


The Road Not Taken: Counterfeit Suns

by fadeverb



Series: In Nomine: the Company [7]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-15 15:51:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 48,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2234697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For once, Leo gets to go into the Marches on official business. Because he's very lucky, he's not even going in there alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which I Am A Valuable Company Resource

I've just executed a damn graceful heel-hook, if I do say so myself, and one nearly level to my chin, when my phone vibrates. A single buzz: text message, not a call. Three times out of four, that's going to be one of my Role's human acquaintances saying something cheerful and uninteresting.

One time out of four, it's my supervisor, and Zabina is entirely supportive of my hobbies, so long as they don't interfere with work. As my current job is best described as "whatever Zabina tells me to do," that means I need to check my text messages.

I end up wedged back in the space between two walls that I'd just climbed away from, shoulders pressed against one and feet against the other, where I can get my hands free to see who buzzed. Zabina. So at least I didn't give up on a promising new route for nothing.

She wants me back at the house. No more information than that, which is more interesting than actual info would be. It's neither a rush order nor a take-your-time. Which means--I could probably get away with finishing this climb, but I'll make a better impression if I head straight home instead.

So much for tonight's entertainment. Maybe I'll be lucky and there's some work with doing ahead.

Lack of work has been an issue. It's not exactly that I expect to get hit with layoffs--the company doesn't do that sort of thing--but I've been spending almost all my time since I joined this group studying languages or running errands a responsible gremlin could handle. I don't have an inclination towards tech (especially as it dies melodramatically in my presence) and I'm not an infiltration expert. At some point the company will find out what to do with me.

Maybe they'll just have me pick up a different specialty set entirely. I learned architecture for Fire, body disposal for the War, and Tether burglary for Theft. If the company wants me to pick up forensic accounting, so be it. I just wish they'd settle on it, so that I could get pointed in the right direction. All the languages I'm working on aren't giving me a useful focus: they're just getting me caught up with the rest of my coworkers.

There's something Zhune said once, about what would happen if I left him, that I've been trying not to think about it lately. Doesn't apply, anyway. It had to do with Heaven, not a lateral transfer inside Theft. (Lateral and slightly down. Reporting to a Marquis by way of a Knight isn't as prestigious as reporting directly to the Boss himself. More comfortable, though. It would take Chaixin actual effort to disassemble me.) What I should do is focus on doing what I'm told, stomp down on any lingering inclination to believe that I know my own talents better than my superiors do, and wait for things to shake out however they will. Because what happens when I feel like I don't fit where I've been put? Going Renegade, that's what happens. Discord and terror and betrayal, and a whole lot of discomfort. It's not worth it. I've learned better by now.

If I had learned this the easy way, instead of the hard way, I'd be a Calabite of the War with a Balseraph girlfriend (who probably would've made Knight by now, given decent advice and someone around to tone down her plans from grandiose to merely ambitious), and I'd know exactly what I was doing with my life.

And maybe Katherine would still be somewhere I could see her. If Regan hadn't gotten her killed. 

Oh, it's not worth thinking about. I have a fast car and a place to keep my books. The last thing I would need right now would be a mortal in need of constant supervision. It's enough to deal with the set of humans I'm supposed to make friends with for Role reasons, and the Soldier at home who loathes me.

I leave the car in the garage, and head for Zabina's office. It's odd how much quieter the house seems at night, when almost the same number of people are awake and around as during the day. Even Giovanna's up more often than not. (How that woman survives on four hours of sleep a night, I don't know. Regular afternoon naps?) No sign of her right now, and Zabina's on the phone when I open the door.

I sit down and wait while she listens. Her responses are brief, and in Mandarin. That doesn't tell me much; it's the common language of the company, as much as Helltongue is, and more likely to be used through tech. It's probably impractical for Lightning to monitor worldwide communications for Helltongue use, but "probably impractical" and "worth risking" aren't quite the same thing. Especially for the company; it's the most risk-averse group I've ever worked for, and I include Fire in that.

Yes, I _do_ count Fire as risk-averse. It's right there in the dissonance condition. You either burn up fast with no plans at all, or you're fucking careful about what you do. Of course the first type's more obvious.

Turns out Theft's the same way. It just takes more work to find the careful side.

Zabina sets the phone down. Her fingers lay flat across the desk beside it for a moment. (She doesn't fidget. Deliberately.) "You've done in another jacket, Leo."

I lift my arm to take a look at the rip. No blood, or I would've noticed it earlier. "There was a small snag in the route. Sorry about that. Did you want me to swap vessels?"

"No need. We're returning to the home office shortly." Every time she looks at me, she's weighing me against some standard. Not sure how well I'm doing this time; it's hard to tell with her expressions. "Chaixin has work for you."

"And you don't like it."

"Don't try to speak for me." Her mouth thins, but only for an instant, while I duck my head. "I have reservations. None of them significant enough to make the matter worth arguing."

"Do I get any details, or is it going to be a surprise when the boss explains?"

"You're going to the Marches," Zabina says.

I can't see how that's supposed to be bad news.

#

Chaixin, Marquis of Theft, the one who saved me and the one who gets to take me apart if it suits her fancy, has destroyed her office furniture. Again. The damned souls clearing out the pieces don't even seem bothered by this; I get the feeling it's a standard chore around here, and there are people coming in with a new desk and chair already. No wonder there are rooms full of extra furniture stashed around this place.

"How long have you spent in the Marches?" the Marquis asks me. She stands in the midst of wooden splinters and metal shards, the way the Boss might stand surrounded by piles of gold. Calabim don't have to care about their surroundings. The world conforms to what we want it to be. So long as we want it broken.

"About a year. Maybe half again as long in subjective time."

Zabina's at my side, with nothing to say. She's here for...I'm not sure. Moral support? Making sure I don't bolt? Or maybe she gets to step in if I'm asked to do anything unreasonable, though I can't imagine what would qualify.

"How well can you operate there?" The Marquis is never anything but direct.

"Not as well as a native or someone working for the local Words, Force by Force. Pretty well for an amateur." I'm not actually sure how to rate this sort of thing. "I can shift my image trivially, and adjust the environment as easily if no one's fighting back. I don't know much of the area, though. I stuck to one city most of the time, or followed a map."

Chaixin looks to Zabina, not me.

"I think that should suffice," Zabina says. "We've worked with less in some places."

"Never alone," Chaixin says.

"Any number of employees could provide backup." Zabina has reached the point she's unhappy about; I can tell because of how evenly she's speaking. "Yuliang could expand her skillset."

"Yuliang has never been to the Marches." Chaixin stands perfectly still while her office is reassembled around her; a damned soul sweeps away the splinters at her feet. "Valentin has."

"Valentin is not functional." Zabina's words are so damn level it's making me nervous.

"Valentin is partially functional." The Marquis's tone is, for an instant, more wry than straightforward. "They've been improving."

Zabina presses her palms flat against the sides of her legs. Sometimes I could think the War's kinder about these things; standing in one of a few approved stances, while being spoken to by an officer, keeps you from needing to control reactions any more deliberately. "I would prefer more improvement before sending them off without supervision."

"They are being supervised." Chaixin's gaze settles on me again. That's never quite comfortable. "Can you work with Valentin?"

I discard several potential responses, ranging from _Can they work with me?_ to _It depends on how handsy they get._ I settle on, "I'm not sure. I can give it a try."

"Erzebet is used to watching them," Zabina says.

"Erzebet has other duties." Chaixin is being--gentle. Though no less relentless for it. "We use the best employees for the task."

Zabina nods shortly. Really, what can anyone say to a Marquis? Except _yes, of course_ and _whatever you like_.

This is the part of the conversation where I would ask Captain Savas a question about the mission, and get slapped down for it. No one's even looking at me right now, which means it's definitely not my turn to speak.

"What are Valentin and I doing in the Marches?" I ask.

"Retrieving a demon," Chaixin says.

I wonder if they want to be retrieved. That, I think, would be a question too far, especially when I don't have more than the gist of this mission. Besides, the Marquis's attention has already moved back to Zabina, who looks the very model of an obedient Lilim in the presence of her employer.

"You have a day," says the Marquis, and that's our exit cue. As we walk out the door, she's sitting down in the chair that a soul has just delivered. Artem stands in the hallway with a monitor in his arms, two damned souls and the intern waiting behind him with more equipment.

"Is this why we save everything to the cloud?" I ask Zabina. But not until we've turned a corner.


	2. An Interlude, In Which Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

You're washing your hands when Chaixin calls. Once upon a time there were a half dozen runners for the office, scampering creatures with enormous eyes and approximately the right number of legs, who carried messages not quite urgent enough to send with a package of Essence through the Symphony itself, but these days everyone has a sullen wad of technology in their pocket to do the same thing. Technology makes useful things smaller, though not any better at keeping secrets or obeying commands.

Let's be honest, Valentin. You don't find technology very much fun. On your best days that's a little extra satisfaction as you're helping people tear it apart and spread it to the wrong places, and on your worst days you're thinking about other things entirely, so it can't be that bad. You have bigger problems than text messages while your hands are wet.

You can't think of anything you've done in the last three days worth a lecture. So if Chaixin wants to speak with you, it can only be good. Or it can only be that you've forgotten.

Forgotten is the wrong word for what happens to what you did when you didn't know you were doing it, because in fact you always knew it at the time, even if you weren't the same set of you-and-yourself as you were when trying to think about the moment later. You are occasionally misfiled of late.

There is absolutely no doubt who's stuck beneath your fingernails. No one important enough for a Marquis to care about. Someone who is now something, and making tediously unpleasant marks across the surface of your phone as you respond that you are on your way. Once upon a time phones had buttons, and writing out messages was very tedious indeed. It was almost worth the time to just walk down the hall and talk to people yourself.

You walk down the hall to Adrian's office, an arm around Wren as she sighs and mutters into your shoulder in a language you don't speak. (It's a language no one speaks, not even her; it only comes out of her when she's drunk, or angry, or in a great deal of pain. No one has been able to identify it yet. No one has tried particularly hard. The company is very good at not asking the awkward questions of people they like.) "You should've stopped at five," you say to her, and kiss the top of her head while she curses into your shoulder. "Maybe four? Certainly by the time you got to six."

"You're the worst," she says. And you're laughing as you open the door to Adrian's office, because this is you at your best and sweetest, company manners for the company, and also because you're almost as drunk as she is. "Adrian, tell them they're the worst."

"I don't have time for this," Adrian says.

He always had the time. He only needed help finding it. Misfiled, just like you. It's amazing what a demon can lose when they're not watching their fingers closely enough. Things just fall.

You stood in front of the door to Chaixin's office, and the cuffs on your coat were absolutely perfect. The only part of you that was not exactly as it should was your fingernails. They itched and stung like something insignificant. Curses and moonlight, equally inconsequential.

Somewhere in the Marches right now, the sun is falling down toward the water.

The whole tedious process of opening the door and walking inside does not get misfiled. It is right here with you. You recall every step towards her desk, and the color of your hand resting against its surface.

The landscape of her face has not changed in all the time you've known her. Only the weather changes. She is between storms, but the clouds are hanging low, hot and wet and dark while they decide between storms and silence. Anyone brave enough to breathe in deep under that sky could drown on dry land.

Well, climate change. Don't they say it's too late to fix anything? Even humans figure out the truth once in a while.

"I would like," Chaixin says, and she never says that, "to send you out on a job." She never says that because she can do what she likes. When the mind wants a fist to close, there is no need to announce the desire, unless the nerves and muscles and bones have formed an opposition party.

Unless they are broken. You are not as reliable as a Marquis might hope. You are occasionally maligned by coworkers who hold old accidents against you, which cannot be helping matters.

You dipped your head, part of a bow that never took your hand from the edge of the desk. It was the least important and most solid point of the room, which made it a useful reference for where you were currently filed. "Chaixin." The way the syllables felt between tongue and teeth hadn't changed in some time, a reassuring familiarity, as many parts of the world had.

"To the Far Marches," she said, and you wanted to laugh, or lunge across the desk, or fall to your knees and kiss the tops of her excellent vermilion boots. So that was the color of the season, for her rank and tastes and Band and other such details that let the fashion-makers of Shal-Mari dictate what the aristocracy of Stygia would choose to wear, or deliberately reject wearing, and thus be controlled by their decrees regardless. Saying no is exactly the same as saying yes. You are still answering the question.

"A charming vacation destination," you said. "I haven't been in years." Decades. "What should I pick up for you while I'm out?"

"We don't walk into dangerous territory alone."

Both your hands lie on the edge of her desk. Two by two, watching each other in an endless spin of you save me and I'll save you. "I'll go with Adrian. He's never been to the Marches. We'll catch up on old times and have such fun like never before."

"Adrian has never been to the Marches," Chaixin says. If she is echoing you, she is not happy. You, Valentin, have done something to make her unhappy, given her reason to reconsider the assignments she gives out, convinced her to call you in here for extra contemplation before she settles on this assignment. She doesn't know your taste well enough anymore to trust you.

Once upon a time you would have

Once upon a time she would have

You nod to what she is saying. Dropping your head, eyes to her desk, that keyboard so new that none of the symbols on it have been worn down. Yes and yes and yes to all her questions. There is nothing difficult about what she asks. You could do it in your sleep.

"I expect you both to return," Daosheng said, a hand to your cheek.

You kissed her fingers. "Should I wonder at the fact that you need to remind me?"

"You should." She left you at the doorway, wings hanging at her back like a cloak of lace. "Chaixin spent ages coaxing the boy home, and she'll throw a fit if you spook him away this soon."

"I won't spook him," you said. You leaned against the door, and let the actual lace of your cuffs fall just so. "Even if I did, where would he run? I'll show him a good time, and we'll find out how much discretion he has. It's not as if I want to get into inconvenient snarls around my Role, either."

"You can spook him a little." She had a solemn mouth and amused eyes, when she cared to possess either. "So long as you can keep up with him when he runs."

"It's not as if I've never worked with new employees before," you told Chaixin. "I'll keep the dreamlings from biting his fingers off, and bring him back to you in one piece. Even Zabina won't find reason to complain."

You can't tell if she believes you or not, and that could bring you down gasping at the absence of air if you weren't almost, nearly, so close to inured to that by now.

"She might," Chaixin says, so dryly that you do laugh.

Go ahead, Valentin. Fall in her lap, and hook an ankle around hers. Let your coat fall open the way it used to. You could bare your throat to her teeth, and say anything at all. Hitch up your skirt and sit on her knee.

You wicked, cowardly creature. You can't even manage that. And here you thought that nothing could frighten you anymore. You were so convinced that all roads lay open before you, the one as apocalyptic and senseless as the next.

The hallway is bare of witnesses. A slippery human thing, old enough to know better, disappeared around the corner as you stepped out. (Not memory of that moment, but knowledge. The two have become decoupled, and run along together all the same, like unhooked cars of a train still running down the same track.) You stand there with your lace and cuffs as precisely arranged as they were on the way in.

There's nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone would have done the same.

Anyone except for all the people who have not, who would not have, whose names you could tick off on your fingernails and then run out out of nails until you took them off someone else.

Not the same people as those with names. There are rules.

You text Adrian seventeen times on the way back to your office. He _can't_ block your number, Artem said. It's against company policy. There might be an emergency.

He never writes, he never calls.

You send one pleasant message to Zabina's student. The one who tastes like rust and electricity. Perhaps Artem can find you an old light socket for comparison. He's a useful little creature, without any pieces sharp enough to cut yourself on.

You will start packing immediately. Never mind bits and pieces and dirty rings that sing their hearts out for the world the instant they're drawn into the Marches. All you need to pack for a trip back to the rambling old hometown is your mind.

It needs a little filing work before it's ready.


	3. In Which We Become Better Informed

I guess the nice thing about my Role not having any particular responsibilities attached to it--Rachel, the nice human girl who lives with a friend of her mother in Germany, has neither the right sort of visa or enough motivation to get a job--is that despite being given a fair amount of time to wrap up business before a long trip to the Marches, it took about half an hour in her office before she declared me ready to go.

Most of that half hour involved Zabina explaining, as diplomatically as she could without significant information loss, what to do if Valentin tries to murder me while we're on the job.

I would probably feel a lot better about sitting in a chair right next to theirs right now if the advice had not boiled down to "run away and call for help."

Chaixin sets a sheet of paper--no, a sheet of stone, the thickness of construction paper, in front of us at the edge of her desk. (Alone, I would feel like I'd been called in front of a professor to discuss my grade on a test. With Valentin beside me, I just keep thinking of Zhune and me being handed a mission we didn't want and couldn't turn down.) The stone is a mottled gray that makes me think, for no reason I can pinpoint, of skin diseases. Maybe because it's an artifact: those can do all sorts of strange things to the mind.

"What terrible handwriting," Valentin says, and picks it up. The glyphs scratched into the stone are only visible in fragments as the light catches them, when the Impudite turns the stone back and forth. "Appropriate for an artifact as shoddy as this. Not everyone takes pride in their work."

I lean sideways to catch more than a word at a time from the message. "Who's Delta?"

"A Habbalite of Technology," Valentin says, which surprises me more than it should. They're not unaware of their surroundings, and I have no reason to think their memory is bad. They just seem--distracted. By whatever goes on in their head, when they haven't set out to harass another person. "I thought they were dead."

"Either they are not," Chaixin says, "or someone who knows we dealt with them is pretending so."

"Either way," Valentin says, as if this is the natural sequence and I'm the only one in here not keeping up with it, "we find whoever sent this message and we bring them back."

"In one piece," Chaixin says. The corners of her eyes crinkle at Valentin's gracious nod. "A piece that can still move, and explain itself."

Valentin smiles. They're charming even when they're not Charming, and I find it a bit unsettling. No one I know certain types of things about should seem that winsome. "It'll still be wiggling. I've never had a chance to speak with the Horror before. We can ask it so many interesting questions on the way back home."

I do not raise my hand, but only because Chaixin's glanced at me, which is my cue for asking questions. "What's this Habbalite's previous association with the company?"

Chaixin doesn't _hesitate_. She just doesn't answer for half a second longer than usual, and that's enough for me to notice. "Daosheng was working to recruit the Habbalite at the time of her death. It was her guide in Tartarus and contact for certain projects there."

And if the company wanted to recruit a Habbalite, of all things, and their Marquis died while she was trying--no, they wouldn't have let that one disappear if they hadn't been pretty damn sure it was dead.

I'm pretty sure this Habbalite isn't going to like the questions being asked. Which means I'm being sent to, ah, not exactly a _kidnapping_ if the Habbalite sent us a note, but still something a lot closer to it than I liked. And here I was just looking forward to a jaunt through the Marches that I could do with authorization for once.

On the other hand, Habbalah of Technology aren't usually idiots. Deluded and monomaniacal, sure, but not _dumb_. So if it's sending us messages, it expects something better than a session on the rack when we arrive. I finagle the message out of Valentin's hands (they are amenable to this, and I manage it without us every once touching) so that I can see what was said. Exactly.

Helltongue isn't a great language for telling the unvarnished truth, but that doesn't mean it's bad at _precision_ , when it wants to be.

"We can't be going through the Tower," Valentin says, "so I suppose it'll be from the corporeal. How do you want us to come back?"

"As seems expedient and safe," Chaixin says, while I read. Valentin was right; the handwriting is so terrible it's hard to make out some of the words.

_Marquis Chaixin of Stygia_   
_I keep trying and trying to reach you_   
_I am in the blue city past the steel mountains_   
_Daosheng said you would take me_   
_I will tell you everything if you will only please get me out of here_   
_Delta_

"How did the message get here?" I ask. It feels like ordinary stone, aside from being an artifact. I can't find anything that it _does_ by trying to see how it sits in the Symphony, except exist on at least two planes of reality at once. If all you want to do is send a message from the Marches from Hell, that's all you need. That and a delivery method.

"Stygian post," Chaixin says, dry as dead ravines. "We're investigating." Meaning that a few demons who shoved a strange artifact into someone else's coat will be shaken down by angry employees, and we're not going to have any useful information before we go.

It turns out I don't have any other questions, or at least not any I'm willing to ask. The Marquis does not micromanage, and I've been asking for real work. Fussing over the details until I look nervous and incompetent is the last thing I want.

And it's not like with the War, where they already had the details arranged, and the details were usually stupid. Or, I don't know, insufficiently personalized. The War is nothing if not _effective_ , insofar as you can call millennia at war without really making it past this endless stalemate "effective"--maybe Heaven's so good that a stalemate is a sign of greatness on our side--but it's effective from the logistical level down, which was never much fun when you're sitting down at the tactical point on the ground, trying to deal with generalized orders for a thousand people that don't take _your_ needs into account. And they certainly don't want to hear about how any given mission could be accomplished better with a little tweaking of the details.

I may still be bitter about that.

When the two of us are standing outside in the hallway--it's all these windowless halls and rooms that make me feel like I'm back in college talking to the English lit profs in their department's assigned basement--Valentin catches the sleeve of my jacket. Possibly I should appreciate the delicacy of the gesture, as they've done so without touching _me_.

"If we're minding each other's business for a while," they say, "it's traditional to have a chat and cup of coffee, together and respectively, before we start saving each other's lives and arguing over which train we ought to pick in the subway station."

"You're surprisingly coherent today." I am being rude, and don't even have the excuse of the comment being necessary.

"Everything makes sense if you pay enough attention to the arc," they say, which sounds rather more like them. They shake white-blond hair out of their eyes, and smile the way Lanthano smiles at me when we're alone. "Will your Lilim report you kidnapped if I take you to a Stygian cafe, or should we use the staff coffee kiosk and scandalize our coworkers?"

My first instinct is _maybe I shouldn't leave company property with Valentin and no one else around,_ which is probably sound reasoning, but a bad sign when we're about to travel to another part of existence together. Just the two of us. "I want to hit the vault before any drinks, and see if we have anything in storage that'll let us track this Habbie through their note."

"Affinity's hardly any use at all in the Marches," Valentin says. They saunter along toward the vault, hand still on my cuff as if they're leading me. (Do I want to pull away, and find out what happens? Maybe not yet.) "It spins in all directions and drops you into holes, where you meet the most interesting people but usually not the ones you meant to meet at the time."

"In the Marches as a whole, sure, but I'm talking inside a Domain. It couldn't hurt."

"You fetch whatever you like," Valentin says, indulgent and amused, which is honestly more insulting than most of Adrian's direct insults have been. "I'll be at the kiosk."

At least they let go of my sleeve.

When I get to the vault, C's in vigorous conversation with Otgonbayar; the Calabite hauls the door open for me while she explains the basics of entropy to the kid.

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.

Well, I tried to explain that to Zhune, and what damn good did it do me? I slip into the vault and head straight for the log book. This whole office runs on smartphones and the company wifi, but if you want to sign out an artifact, you're literally signing.

There are dozens of entries in here. Most of it's cheap, as artifacts go. Talismans that give you an edge on some skill you might not be great at, scraps of Songs glued to widgets, a few things that don't do _anything_ special besides follow you from one realm to another. One entry lists an honest to God fiery sword that someone stole from the Sword--not the Archangel, presumably, just someone within--but there's a note saying no one can get it to turn on. Probably only works for angels. The only person who's ever signed it out was Daosheng.

She seems like someone I might've liked, except for being a Marquis. Based on what little I've heard about her, and the whole big negative space painted by how everyone reacts to her absence. But if she were still with the company, I probably wouldn't be. The bits of chance wouldn't have lined up the same way.

She's dead, and I'm here. Things fall apart and that's how new things get a chance to happen. C would appreciate the sentiment, if I told her that, but I wouldn't dare use that example out loud in the halls of this place.

I'm sure Zhune has a new partner by now. Someone else whose life he can make very exciting and then completely broken only because I got out of the way and left the partner slot open. The more things change, the more new ways we find to fuck up the same damn things as before.

Getting maudlin doesn't get the job done. I end up grabbing a T-shirt that I do _not_ intend to wear anywhere that other people can see it, and a rock on a chain with an entry that says it can heal souls. Healing minds would be even more useful, but there's nothing tagged for that in this whole vault. And why would there be? Why does Theft ever want to go to the Marches?

To steal people, of course.


	4. In Which I Get A Nap

Valentin is capable of keeping up a friendly conversation for minutes at a time. They take their coffee black with six lumps of sugar--the company still deploys sugar cubes at the staff lounge kiosk, rather than packets, and I can barely imagine what it costs us--and speak winningly, extensively, and quite _vaguely_ about their previous Marches experience.

I already knew they worked for Nightmares. What did they do in the Marches? Ordinary Nightmares things, apparently. The gist of the conversation seems to be that I should let them handle everything, follow their instructions, and rest assured that we'll get the mission done with no trouble at all.

I wonder what they count as trouble.

Zabina texts me about scheduling while Valentin is drinking their coffee and expositing in a highly unuseful manner about permeable Domains that lead into semi-permeable ones. "We can drop down now," I say; I'd rather interrupt than try to get useful information out of this conversation. Valentin has taken the concept of small talk to exciting new dimensions. "Or I can, and you can follow at the last possible moment."

"Is she concerned about disturbance," Valentin asks, "or what I'll do to her carpets, given enough time?"

"I was assuming the former. Should I know something about you and carpets?"

"You should know far more than you do," Valentin says, with a winning smile.

"Yeah, I've always considered education a lifelong process too. After me." I reach for the corporeal, and the distant hum below my feet--metaphorically speaking--of the last place I touched it.

It's a little like falling, and a little like being reshaped. Maybe it's most of all like putting on clothes; I get to stop showing off who I really am, and get back to looking like another person entirely.

Maybe it's just how long I was walking around with that one Discord on me, but the corporeal feels a lot more natural than the celestial, no matter that "celestial" is the group of sentient beings I belong to. Even when I'm wearing my less favorite vessel.

I shove my hands in my pockets, and take a few steps away. People usually don't land _on_ you when they follow you down from the corporeal--not when you arrive in celestial form, no matter how fast you pull your vessel up--but it can still get awkward in tight spaces like this. "This" being Zabina's office, with her already behind her desk making serious faces at paperwork.

I'm pretty sure that's just for Valentin's benefit, when they arrive.

Their vessel is Chinese, which makes sense for where they were stationed before, and almost as pale blond as their true form; that part's more surprising. They are dressed--not exactly as Yuliang would, but similarly, glitter and lip gloss and miniskirt, but with combat boots I'd like to own myself. Likely the fashion's a decade out of date; I wouldn't be able to tell.

Of course what their vessel looks like is irrelevant to pretty much anything, as we're jumping to the Marches shortly. I've always imagined the Marches as lying adjacent to the corporeal, somehow; it's easier to get there from this part of reality than the celestial part. Humans do it by accident and instinct every night.

"What a pretty little thing," Valentin says. "Daosheng would have liked it."

I'm not sure if it helps any that they're talking about the vessel, not me. Like commentary on an outfit I've picked out. (More like commentary on an outfit someone else laid out for me.) I ask Zabina, "Where would you like us to set out from?"

"The wine cellar," Zabina says. "Giovanna is laying out sheets."

"How gothic." Valentin takes a pen off Zabina's desk, and spins it between their fingers. "We ought to add a few monks, and perhaps men dipping their daggers into a bowl of blood. Giovanna is Elif's replacement, isn't she, so I haven't met her at all, though I heard about her hair and fingers."

"Don't touch my possessions," Zabina says. "Valentin."

They place the pen back on her desk, lined up precisely with the edge. "You have such a good grip on what you've set hands to. Every Word you've served would be proud of you, when they remember."

If this were my office, I'd have--words. It's not. I wear a bland expression and let Zabina handle her own boundary-drawing.

"You remember the way to the cellar," she tells them. "Don't you?"

"I remember you being a better host," Valentin says, smiling all the while.

"I'll just go look in on the sheet-laying," I say, and ditch that conversation before it can get anywhere nearer the ones Zabina tends to have with Adrian. Not that Valentin speaks anything like Adrian. There's just a similarity in both demons' ability to narrow in on the most critical points possible.

Giovanna has, it turns out, laid out two camp beds I didn't know we had. She's wearing her secretary face: all business, no reaction. There's nothing about me for her to react to just now. 

Valentin's entrance, a jaunty sweep down the cellar stairs two at a time, gets a look from her, and tension lines all down her back until she gets a breath in and her posture back to normal. She's a professional at radiating calm when under stress. For short periods of time, anyway; a pack of baby Magpies can make inroads on that calm if no one stops them. Generally we do. Generally they _know_ better, even as children; Zabina's not the sort of person you want as an enemy.

Baby Magpies have enough sense to be afraid. Valentin smiles at Giovanna, and she breaks into a smile in return. Tiny but genuine. "Just as I heard," Valentin says, lifting a hand almost to her face. They're being so very careful not to touch her that it's an outright mockery of Zabina's rules. "You have such hair, and I imagine--"

"Giovanna," I say, "Zabina wants you in the office."

Her mouth presses tight. She knows damn well there's no such command that I've suddenly remembered. No, I'm the asshole who's making her leave right when she's met someone interesting.

But she doesn't contradict me. She gives Valentin a polite little nod, and leaves. There's a lot to be said for servants who don't argue.

There's also a lot to be said for not putting people into situations where arbitrary orders are the only good way to resolve matters. "Can you interact with people without Charming them?" I ask Valentin. "Is that even an option?"

"Everyone likes being Charmed, Leo." They run their fingers through their hair, and turn that same smile on me. "A portion of everyone decides to regret it after the fact, that's all."

"That's a working theory, sure." I sit down on one of the camp beds, and on consideration, don't take off my shoes. Someone else washes the sheets around here, and if I'm woken up in an emergency, best to be ready to run. "What sort of distance are we looking at, if we both fall asleep here?"

"You've never taken a friend to the Marches with you? How lonely." Valentin sits cross-legged on the other bed, hands resting on the heels of their boots.

"I've gone up with people before, but always through a Tether."

"Surely not," they say, nothing but amusement. "Little Magpies who try to sneak into the Marches through the Tower come to entertaining ends."

"No, one on--Never mind. I expect we'll find each other once we're up there."

"You paid the dreamlings? Or did you sneak past them, up their own Tether, when they're so precious about the comings and goings these days? What a novel approach. Their doors are too rusty to swing open for a demon of any real size these days." They prop their elbows on knees, chin in hands. "Which Tether did you use? One in North America, given your haunts, so none of the really interesting ones."

"I don't think that's any of your business."

"Teotihuacan? They'd cut your heart out. Oh, don't tell me the _Kansas_ Tether is still clinging. The lions and tigers and bears haven't been paying their dues to Hell, and all the new Oz remakes practically forget about Kansas. It won't hold out much longer unless they find a charismatic child to play Dorothy for them all over again. If they took any advice from those in the know--"

"They'd probably do terrible things, right. Are we going to the Marches, or are we just going to talk about it?"

"You were much more polite when you weren't as frightened," Valentin says. "I like you better this way."

I lie down on the bed. "And god knows I live for your approval. Why don't you go first and show me how it's done?"

They roll over on their side, pale hair slipping across their arm. "You don't want me to see you sleeping," they say. "Watch how it's done."

They close their eyes, and fall asleep. It's really that simple for those of us who only sleep when we want to, and don't have dreamscapes of our own. Unconscious creation is for humans. We do it the hard way.

I think our way is more fun, anyway.

In sleep, Valentin looks like--oh, an angel, in the sense humans think of them. A little more glitter-touched than the usual pop culture images, but all the serene innocence you'd look for in a heavenly creature.

I know Malakim, and I know Valentin. So I'm not fooled. I close my eyes, and decide to sleep.

Goodbye, corporeal world. Hello, land of dreams.


	5. In Which We Avoid Dreams

Every time I've ascended to the Marches before, it's been through a Tether. Getting there through sleep is...odd. Less like being shot up a waterfall, and more like sinking into the ceiling. Silver sand drifts around my bare feet.

But of course I'd still be wearing the image I used the last time I was here. Rachel as a street punk who's ready to swipe your wallet: that's the general look, lack of shoes aside. Scruffier and wilder than Zabina lets me appear in public these days. Or at home, come to think of it. Entirely inappropriate for being taken seriously in the Marches.

If such an image exists. You can tell a lot about someone here from what they look like, but not how powerful they are.

Before anything else, I dream shoes back on. I _liked_ those shoes. They made me better at running away from things that wanted to eat me, or catching up with people who tried to take my stuff. Good shoes for Theft, which is probably why the Boss stole them from me in turn. If it even counts as stealing when a Prince takes his Servitors' toys. What's ours is his, and what's anyone's is his. That's how the Word goes.

Silver sand at my feet, which is standard--it's as close as the Marches gets to air, as ubiquitous environmental aspects go--and drifting around me, dark mirrors and shivering bubbles. A pool of water with an oily sheen resists the tap I give it with the toe of my newly crafted shoes: however much it looks like water, it doesn't intend to let me in.

"Humans are so private," Valentin says. I didn't hear them walk up behind me. I'll blame the sand, which deadens all sound, or the mist, which makes it hard to see people sneaking up on you. "They want to keep the insides of their heads private. As if they don't all use the same stories and bits and pieces as anyone else in their classroom and century."

"Do you think it's that volitional?" Now that they've caught up, I don't have to stick to an image they'd recognize; time to shift to something I prefer. I start reconstructing the first vessel I ever had. It didn't look much like my celestial form, but it was...solid. Familiar. And some people in the Marches who I'm still on good terms with might recognize me that way.

"Very little that humans do in the Marches is conscious," Valentin says. "That doesn't keep it from being a series of choices. They wish and want and drag themselves towards those snippets of desire by their fingertips, and that they'd deny all of it on waking doesn't change any of it. If you had met me two centuries ago, I would've shown you." They flick their fingers airly towards one of the quivering bubbles. If ever a soap bubble the size of a closet looked unhappy, that one does.

"Even aside from the part where I wasn't alive two centuries ago, I don't think you would have just shown me around the Marches. If we'd run into each other here."

"I might have," Valentin says. "I would have enjoyed it." They smile like--no one who would try to be charming. Like a friend who's out on a job with another friend, a little amused by the whole business.

God, I should know better by now.

"Speaking of which, let's get out of the Vale before any of the colonial authorities catch up with us." I shove my hands in my pockets, and start walking. Direction in the Marches is strange, but in some ways the Vale is the easiest part to navigate. There are three directions: toward Beleth, toward Blandine, and out.

A mirror to my left lifts up, its surface brightening. But with jagged pulses of light. Nothing peaceful, that, and when it starts moving away, I adjust my path to a ninety-degree angle away from it. That's towards Beleth: check. Either celestial-weighted direction's lethal and we'd like to avoid both.

"If we're the colonizers," Valentin asks, matching my pace, "who are the natives? The humans or the ethereals?"

My instinct is to say _the ethereals_ , but...it's a good question. I think. Almost all the ethereals are born from the dreams of humans, one way or another.

Almost all of them.

"Were the Marches there before the corporeal plane?" I ask.

"In whatever insignificant time existed between the beginning of reality and those dull fools throwing rocks around for billions of years, without any thought to make interesting creatures instead of stars? What does it matter?" Valentin spreads their wings out, nearly catching me with the nearest one. They seem content to wear their celestial form for now, complete with those boots and that long coat. "Humans colonize, and oppress other humans, and it's all very sad and tedious and predictable, because they're all rather the same deep down. If demons rule over ethereals and humans, it's a different order entirely. We don't oppress cattle." They shake their head, mist catching at the edges of their hair. "Do you really intend to wear that the whole trip through?"

"What's wrong with this image?"

"If you have to ask that," Valentin says, "there's no way to explain it to you."

"You have all the manners of a five-year-old," I say, and kick up a spray of sand as I walk. "FYI."

"Civility is something to grow, and then grow out of," Valentin says, as pleasant as they ever care to sound. "Like baby teeth."

"And here I was starting to believe Impudites were good at being social."

"Don't confuse getting along with people and getting what you want from them." Valentin's teeth are sharp whenever they smile at me. "Lanthano gets _along_ with people, and what has he ever gotten out of that?"

"Personal satisfaction and the approval of his Marquis?"

Valentin's expression flattens, and for about a third of a second, I am intensely reminded that they have more Forces than I do, and several centuries on me.

That's how it long takes them to smile again.

"It's no wonder you run through Words," Valentin says, affectionate in almost exactly the way Zhune was when I'd just come up with a particularly risky and complicated plan that he found amusing. "We'll fix your image later." They beckon to me with two fingers, like I'm a dog, and walk away in almost exactly the direction I was walking anyway.

If I weren't so very dedicated to getting the job done, I would be inclined to make my own way out of here. But I have some ability to make long-term plans based on long-term goals, and not act entirely on spite. Honest. It's one of those things that distinguishes me from Valentin, who, as far as company report has it, can only form long-term plans anymore when they're based on...well. Spite.

As it is, I follow their lead. They are the native guide. And while no one in the company has told me enough about Valentin's time in Nightmares for me to know how much info they have on the Marches, they should know the Vale front to back. The way I used to know Sheol, and all its pits.

Sheol had a great many pits, of about equal noise. It was, in retrospect, a tedious place, and I'm saying that in the midst of endless silver sand and gray fog. All the screaming sounds the same after a while. Everything that makes humans unique in life gets stripped away by endless fire, endless pain... I don't see how it's worth it, honestly. There are quieter ways to get Essence out of damned souls. Maybe it's just that some Princes have an attachment to the traditional. Or the first means of coercion they learned.

It's such an odd thought, that. Princes _learning_ anything, in the sense of skills rather than new bits of information. You try to imagine Lucifer picking up a new hobby, or Michael discovering something he'd never tried before, and see how far your imagination can get. Even in the realm of semi-infinite imagination, a few concepts boggle the mind.

A writhing horror surges up from the sand in front of us. It's not particularly boggling, compared to other concepts: very Giger-meets-Cthulhu, all tentacles and dark ooze. It lashes a tentacle my way.

I'm still on the cusp of a decision--avoidance or a nice vicious explanation of why I shouldn't be fucked with?--when Valentin grabs the tentacle with one hand. "This," they say to me, "is a clear sign of amateur work."

"Amateur, traditional..." I shove my hands in my pockets. (It makes no difference, out in the wild Marches. In a Domain, it might, but the Vale doesn't tolerate Domains any more than deep sea rifts tolerate hang-gliding.) "Tentacles are classic, aren't they?"

"Hardly." Valentin rips the tentacle off the creature. It has a squall like iron nails crushing glass, which they pay no mind. "Snakes are traditional. Endless falls are traditional. The humiliation experienced in front of one's peers--" They take a tentacle in each hand, and pull them off as methodically as a human removing packaging from a snack. "--is traditional. This is modern schlock based on horror movies and a poor understanding of Lovecraft and hentai."

"So," I say. "Nightmares."

Valentin shoots me a look, the corners of their mouth turning up. "Do I detect an opinion on another Word, Leo? Have you encountered them before?" Another two tentacles go, and now they have one hand on the monster to hold it in place, while it thrashes for freedom.

"Now and again." I wave a hand vaguely. "I think you can let it go, now."

"Why?"

Because it's a shrinking, squealing thing and I suspect it has far fewer Forces than either of us and I don't think it's fair to murder something that's no threat to either of us. Though an ethereal murder is a little less dangerous than a corporeal one, if it's the gremlin or small demon I suspect it is. "Don't we have places to be?"

"Never," Valentin says, digging their hands into the center of the dripping, roiling mass, "let some tiny creature that dislikes you escape, simply because it seems harmless." They pull out handfuls of blackness and nothing, as if they're throwing black holes out into the air. The theoretical air that the Marches has: I'm only breathing because it feels like I ought to be, here. "Once upon a time I had handfuls of these who could snivel and cower and plead at the slightest threat. I got so much more information from them than the ones who stood up and snapped back."

"This one's snapping back," I point out.

Valentin wipes their hands clean on a handkerchief produced from god knows where, while the creature dissolves into black particles. Then gray, another indistinguishable part of the mist around us. "Not anymore," they say. "If you're such a pacifist, maybe you should have joined Lust."

"Lust isn't all that good at playing nice with others either."

They smile fondly at me. "No. I suppose not. Do you have any idea what your hair looks like in that image?"

"...yes?"

"And you chose to make it look like that anyway. Amazing. Do keep close. The Vale is full of pests like that."

They say that like they're not worried in the slightest. But they step sharply when they move on, and I know enough to take the hint. The Vale's full of gremlins, and Malakim, and at least one each of Princess and Archangel. Best not to linger.

I would rather not run into any other inhabitants while we're here. Just. On principle.


	6. In Which Old Friends Have Not Forgotten Me

We clear the Vale without murdering anyone else. So that's something. There's not a razor-sharp line between the land of human dreams and the Land Of Dreams, as these things go, but it's still pretty clear when you're not seeing a single dream in sight that you're outside of the territory of Beleth or Blandine.

Their official territory, anyway. Both of them seem to view this entire plane of reality as something they ought to rightfully rule. I suppose Blandine might claim more benevolent reasons than Beleth. Heaven makes a lot of claims of that sort. In my experience, when someone's pulling out your fingernails, it doesn't matter much if their goals are virtuous or not. Pretty sure most ethereals feel the same way.

"We should head for the mountains," I say, before Valentin can come up with a terrible idea that I have no good way to argue against. Maybe they do have centuries of experience on me in the Marches; they're still not particularly coherent in places.

"Classic," Valentin says. "The mountains are usually the fastest route."

"Oo, and you have a reason to argue against it anyway, don't you."

"You're getting better at this." Valentin makes a patting motion toward my shoulder, without connecting. "Have you been to the city before?"

"Not that one."

"So you don't know about the entrances! You should see the teeth on the guards." Valentin spins a finger in the air, describing more of a spherical idea than anything pointy. "We'll take a back entrance."

"Don't tell me you're afraid of a few ethereals," I say, largely because I want to know if there _are_ any ethereals they're afraid of.

"If I meant to raze a Domain, leaving no brick atop another brick, and salt its fields," Valentin says, "I would bring along a few more people to watch my back and play sacrifice in front of any godlings that disagreed. Did you want to be a sacrifice?"

"Been there, done that, checked it off the lifetime achievements list. So what would you recommend?" I would like to spin some images off in the mist, as long as we're doing nothing but arguing. It's just--it feels a little odd, dreaming anything up in front of someone like them. Zhune might have been able to critique my choices, but I was a damn sight better than him at making what I wanted out of the thin air, in the Marches.

"Sand and water. Then a secret door. Or the heart of an asp large enough to walk inside, but those have been difficult to find these last four centuries. We could simply dream up the process, sand water door asp heart, but it wouldn't do any good." Their smile is sharp at the edges. "Do you follow?"

"Figments aren't sufficiently solid to hook into the thematic resonance of the Domain doors we're trying to break into, so we need to find find an existing Domain with enough of the keys that there's solid continuing belief in them."

"Good boy," Valentin says.

I shove my hands in my pockets, and set off toward the mountains. It's as good a destination as any, and if I keep walking I'm less likely to do something stupid. "Are you trying to find out how hard I can punch?"

"I could've let you get in a shot at that gremlin," Valentin says. They keep pace with me, so close I'll bump into them if my elbows swing too far. "I could've called down more trouble and watched you react. Would you like to hit me?"

"Non-consensual violence between employees is against company policy. I read the handbook. It was underlined and everything."

"So you would like to."

"Life," I say, "is composed almost entirely of _not doing_ things we'd like to do, because otherwise life tends to be very, very short. In fact, the part where we keep on living is one of those few areas where we get to do what we like."

Valentin smiles sideways at me. "One day you'll walk through a doorway and realize that you haven't felt the bite of where your first Word was torn away from you in weeks, and you'll have to stop right there to wonder if you're even the same person as the one who was first bitten. Probably not today. At the very least you have to do something about that clothing."

"Flannel is classic."

"Where?"

I shrug. "You know. Classic. In places you probably haven't visited."

Lanthano would make a joke about hipsters here, I think. Valentin arches two perfect eyebrows, and adjusts my clothing. Mine and theirs at the same time, which is a neat trick I'd appreciate more if they weren't _fucking with my image_.

"Stop that," I say. I've stepped back without even thinking about it. Without thinking is the problem; the Marches are made of thought, and Valentin's cracked enough to act as fast as they think of the action. Maybe faster.

"Don't be so fussy," Valentin says. "I'm not touching you. I haven't Charmed you, or you would be far more cooperative when I'm helping you past a few shortcomings that haven't kept you from gainful employment, though one does wonder at times." They've lost wings and horns, all those signs of being a true demon in the world of dreams, and acquired clothing that's not appropriate for this century. I see they've always appreciated the themes of white and gold, though now more pearls and lace are involved than before.

"New rule," I say. "Messing with my image _counts as touching_."

"Considered," Valentin says sweetly. "Rejected. An amendment to the contract between two parties only achieves validity when both agree to said amendment."

"You really haven't dealt with many Lilim, have you?" I fall back another step as _I_ start to shift. Not just what I'm wearing, but my image of my own body. "Now that--"

"If you don't like it," Valentin asks, "why are you letting me do it?"

"Because I'm trying to be a team player, you idiot." And because I've never fought this kind of shaping before. I've had the occasional fight over what the landscape does around us, plenty of good old-fashioned punch-them-in-the-mind stabbing matches, but no one's ever bothered to mess with my image. Why would they? Why upset another person you don't know the power of when you're not going straight for blood?

I pull the idea of myself around me, like I'm hauling on a rope. I lived that vessel for years. Ate and breathed and sweated and pissed and slogged around on my own two feet because I couldn't afford to replace the cars that broke down around me. I _know_ my own body, as it was for that time. As it was when I first hit the corporeal and that meaningless Discord I'd always had on my soul locked me inside the corporeal flesh.

It's like hauling on a rope when someone else is pulling on the other end, but I keep my own face and body. Not so much the clothes, and I am not entirely sure my hair's what it was before.

"Fuck you, Valentin."

"Not on the job," they say. They are the voice of reason. If it weren't for knowing just how strongly the employee manual prohibits violence, I would--

Well. No. I'm pretty sure that if I tried to punch Valentin here, they'd laugh. It'd be like...trying to snap at Zhune. Never did any fucking good. "If you keep messing with what I look like," I say, in my best reasonable adult voice, never mind how much it sounds like their, "none of my contacts will recognize me when I go asking nicely for entrance to a place with sand, water, and more secret doors than you can shake a stick at. So maybe you could hold off on that a bit. While we're _on the job_."

"Tell me," Valentin says, "of your contacts."

Their amusement is starting to get on my nerves less, if only because I'm getting used to it.

"Heliopolis," I say, and scan the landmarks that the Marches offer me. The mountains, of course, but there's also a cluster of moons that only appear if you know to look for them--Ferro had to teach me that one--and a place in the mist that's a sucking current. That last one's not visible; you have to feel around for it. You could mistake it for a breeze if you didn't know better.

There's also a breeze in the mist that shows up in some places, but it's a bad idea to follow that one.

Valentin has been quiet for entire minutes of walking. I double-check to make sure they're still with me. Yes, and silent at my side, which is...less reassuring than one might hope.

"Heliopolis."

"That's what I said, Valentin."

"Pyramids. The river. The crocodile god."

"Yes, well, it _does_ meet all your criteria, aside from the giant asp heart, and you never know with that place. My old landlord might have one in the basement."

Valentin watches me as we walk. I kick up sand with every other step; their feet don't leave any marks. I wonder if they can feel the current we're following, or if they're paying attention to signs I haven't been clued in on.

"Leo," Valentin says at last.

"Yes?"

"When did you live in Heliopolis?"

"I was pretty sure you read that file you got from the Shal-Mari Lilim."

"It contained several official lies," Valentin says, "none of which are particularly relevant, unless you spent your time between the War and Theft doing much stranger things than anyone has hinted at yet." They don't actually sound amused, anymore. I'm not sure what that tone is.

"Well," I say. "I spent some of that time living in Heliopolis. It seemed like a good way to keep out of trouble."

"The city with the crocodile god."

"I don't think he's a god _of_ crocodiles, exactly." Not like the way the god of whales works. "Though he picked up quite a few areas of responsibility as his pantheon faded. Death and the afterlife, boundaries, fertility, the movement of stars, all that kind of thing. I'm not really sure on how the last set is relevant, but the locals care about it a lot. Half my architectural consults involved an astrologer. Astronomer. Whatever." I pause to check my bearings, and step to the right until I'm right in the heart of the current. "Maybe there's not actually a difference between the two around here."

"How did you get into Heliopolis?" Valentin asks.

"Across the river. It's a pretty porous border. You've been, haven't you?"

Valentin stops, right there in the sand. And starts laughing. Helpless, howling laughter, hands over their mouth, though that's doing nothing to stop the sound.

" _What._ "

"You crossed the border!" Valentin gasps. "You went in over the river."

"It's a token border check for hostility. Dozens of people cross in every day."

"Right past the god."

"Yes, border duty is sort of his _thing_. That's why it shuts down at night, and he lurks in the river looking dangerous and saying very arch things to people who question his decisions."

"You talked to the god!" They're still laughing.

" _On occasion_ , would you try to acquire enough sanity to keep up with the walking thing for about another half hour?"

They grab the collar of my jacket, which is nothing at all like what I would like to be wearing. "No wonder Adrian hates you," Valentin says. "It's the funniest thing I've heard in months."

"I'm not sure if I like you better when you're being coherent." I detach myself from their hands. Let's not even get into a discussion of whether it counts as touching when they grab the clothes they dreamed onto me. "But could we get back to that state anyway, since we're trying to work?"

"By all means, let's go to Heliopolis," Valentin says, and spins a cane they weren't holding an instant of thought ago. "Introduce me to your old friends."

I'm a lot less sanguine about taking this shortcut now that the Impudite approves of it.

#

There's a standard formula when you're standing on the bank of the river, but I honestly don't remember it. Couldn't render it in the original language, anyway, and there's some dispute about appropriate translations... Never mind that. I stand with my feet half a meter from where the water laps against the mud, and I recite: "I abhor the eastern land, I will not enter the place of destruction, none shall bring me offerings of what the gods detest, because I pass pure into the midst of the Milky Way, one to whom the Lord of All granted his power on that day when the Two Lands were united in the presence of the Lord of All Things."

This time, I don't even have to throw rocks at anyone before the crocodile god appears. He pays rather more attention to this side of the river, and who could blame him? He already _knows_ everyone on the other side. Boats rock, and no few of them go scudding away with sails popping up to catch the river wind, as he stumps forward until his head's entirely out of the water. When Sobek yawns, I could step inside his mouth without getting my hair mussed.

"That's for the other side," he says. "It's been a while, Leo." His eyes are the pale yellow of cut stone, and each the size of my head. They seem to be pointed at the Impudite standing behind me, just now. "Maybe it's none of my business what you've been up to, but a crocodile does wonder."

"The usual," I say, hands in my pockets. Valentin dreamed me up a coat without any outside pockets convenient for the gesture, but I fixed _that_ part. "Meeting unpleasant people, trying not to die. How's the city?"

"Nothing you designed fell down."

"Not even the pit traps?" I clear my throat when that gaze fixes itself on me. You'd think it would be hard for a pair of eyes that far apart to focus on a person standing that close to the crocodile's nose. And yet. "Anyway, I thought I'd stop by and say hello. Recite a few spells reminding you not to eat me. Ask after things."

"You want a favor," Sobek says. "Given the lack of rocks, I expect you want several favors, and here you are without anything to give me. Unless that's what the demon is for?"

"I'm not edible," Valentin says. They sound as if they believe this is a joke, and I am sure they are taking it quite seriously. A god's no fucking joke even for someone as sturdy as Valentin. Not even a diminished god with other things on his mind.

"They're...no. That's not what they're here for. Hey, is Ferro still in the city?"

"It left a few weeks after you did," Sobek says. "Your lease expired, and it didn't care to renew."

"Has it been back since?"

"I am a god." Sobek yawns, a deliberate display that I maybe should pay attention to. "Not a personal secretary. As long as you're asking, no, it didn't come back, though that briefcase-toter came along once to ask similar questions. He, however, asked far more politely, and offered something in exchange."

Well. Penny would. And of course Penny had come looking for me here after I disappeared on him. Before he figured out Valefor stole me, and that I'd sent Katherine away, and that--okay, that's a whole section of my life that isn't relevant to anything I'm doing right now, and it's not worth dwelling on.

"I really just want into the city," I say. "As long as you're asking."

Sobek sniffs; that's testing my scent, not an expression of disdain. I think. "Wasting my time, over that? Pay a ferry and come inside. You haven't changed that much. But that one can't come along."

"I sort of need them." I have no idea what the Marquis would say to me if I misplaced Valentin in the Marches. Nothing good, I'm sure.

"She smells like Nightmares."

"They're not in Nightmares anymore."

"I know," Sobek says, "or we wouldn't be standing around having this conversation, as my mouth would be full."

"We're only planning on passing through," I say, though I'm pretty sure it's a lost cause. There's not a lot of _arguing_ with a god, at least not in any productive manner. "Straight for a door, no messing around with tombs or tourists. Swear to god. No Nightmares involved."

"You're welcome. She's not."

Valentin is giggling again, hands cupped over their mouth. I could do without the laugh track in the background. "They can't be that much worse than I was." Okay, I don't believe that one even when I'm saying it. "And you let my other friends through, including ones with unfortunate associations."

"I judge the individual, not the association. Even if some associations are a useful shorthand for worthless, yet edible." The crocodile's look is pointed.

"Yes. Well." My smile's crooked. "So that's a no?"

"Because I have always liked your tomb design," Sobek says, "I'll offer you a deal. I eat this demon so that she's not bothering anyone, and you can do whatever you like. Move back in, find a better class of friends..." A crocodile can't actually shrug, but the cascade of river water rolling off his back upsets a boat and gets the same point across.

I'm not tempted.

Much.

"While I appreciate the thought, I have promises to keep, some of which preclude that route. Thanks, but no thanks."

"If you change your mind," Sobek says, sinking back into the dream-Nile, "you know where to find me."

I wait until he's vanished entirely into the water before I turn my back. It's best not to saunter away from watching gods, and doubly so when they're based on large carnivores.

"So much for the quick and easy approach," I tell Valentin.

"You must have such interesting friends. Big ethereals, little ethereals, strange men with briefcases. Don't tell me that Trader came hunting for you all the way out here."

"Don't be ridiculous, Valentin." I don't know where I'm walking, except for away from the Nile. It only looks infinite; the river's quite easy to lose behind us in the mist. "Do you have a place for us to try next, or are we just going to wander around until we run into a desert island with a single palm tree in the center?"

"Not enough secret doors in those." Valentin catches up with me, and holds onto the cuff of my jacket. They've caught the button of the cuff between two fingers. I could dream it away.

I don't want to have that fight again. Clothes: not important enough to argue about. Not around here. I lost _that_ fight when I joined the company, all told. 

"Valentin," I say, "do you have anything to add to the current game plan, or are we just going to walk in circles until I come up with another idea? Because that's Plan B."

"There's no point in making a series of plans when the Symphony grinds them all to pieces," Valentin says. "We'll take the slipstream, but you'll have to hold on. Don't you think they should have named it something else? Perhaps no one had invented meatgrinders when they were naming the parts of reality. You'll like it."

"...meatgrinders?"

"The slipstream." They smile with perfect confidence and charm.

I don't think I'm going to like it.


	7. An Interlude, In Which Security Standards Are Maintained

You stopped laughing at some point. The feel of it still waits behind your lips, and on your fingertips. Never mind the taste of that; every time you tried to explain, your traveling companion failed to understand.

Something has broken in the process that starts with your thoughts and ends with another person understanding what you wanted to share of them, and you might never figure out where the gap lies.

Never mind that either. If you wanted him to understand, you would make him, and if he doesn't, isn't that all the funnier? He must be driving Adrian. Mad. Absolutely mad. You can picture the ranting, the pacing, the gestures that remain the same in every single host Adrian picks, because those gestures are those belonging to his own form, recast for human limitations.

He is walking beside you. A figment. You dismiss it, unmade in a way that proves it's nothing but dream and lack of substance. No spark of self. No will.

"Did you hear that?" asks Leo.

"It's the Marches," you tell him. Oh, yes, you _can_ be the voice of authority here, and if you were a lesser being, more insecure and less yourself, maybe you would play that further than it goes. "Strange noises come with the territory."

"I didn't ask if the sounds were _unusual_ , Valentin, but if you heard anything."

"Not a thing, Leo. Try not to get paranoid around here, where what you fear is most liable to show up because you're afraid of it. Haven't you ever dealt with a hostile environment before?"

"Yes," he says. "It's called Hell, maybe you've heard of it?"

You have cornered Lanthano by the coffe kiosk in the lounge, where the damned soul steaming milk can't help him. He never used to look at you that way. He never used to look at anyone that way, not even the Gamester who showed up to audit the company's paperwork, when every employee in Stygia set aside their private grievances to tag-team the poor Djinn into a nervous breakdown. (Of course Djinn can have nervous breakdowns, as you told Adrian at the time. You'd seen several before. You'd caused a few. It was fun, so long as the Djinn in question wasn't your minion or supervisor or someone you were counting on to keep an inconvenient tidbit of information stored away obsessively and not dribbled out for anyone to slip in.) You set your hands to either side of him, palms to the wall, and do not dwell on circumstances in which you and Lanthano have held quite similar positions in the past. No doubt he's doing all the dwelling necessary on that point.

"What's in the bucket?" you asked him.

"A new employee," he said. "Keep your hands off him."

You kissed him, to see what he would do. It wasn't particularly interesting. "I've never hurt an employee," you told him. "I've never hurt you. If you mean to get all twitchy about every little thing that happens around here, maybe you should have someone check you over for signs of Discord."

"Would you stop _doing_ that?" he asked. Said. Commanded? You weren't touching him, anyway. He was a fussy sort of Calabite, so unlike either Marquis in that way, but you knew better than to press the point. Even to, well, prove a point.

"Stop doing what?" you asked.

"Messing with my clothing," Leo said. His eyes and nose and hair were all wrong, and his cheekbones could've used improvement, though the shape of his face was acceptable if he really wanted to project that sort of thing, which was not entirely certain. Demons shouldn't be allowed in the Marches until they know what it is they mean to project.

"A mess is what you made. I'm doing the precise opposite of that." You must have given him that coat; he would never have dreamed it up on his own, though Zabina might have made it for him, if she were here. This would all go differently if Chaixin had sent the Lilim along with you. Or Wren! No experience, but such ideas. Or Itimad.

You remember distinctly that Itimad can't come with you to the Marches, unless you mean to abandon her there. Maybe everyone would prefer that. It would be a relief, most of all to your coworkers who won't admit they want to stop thinking about her entirely.

If you lost her here, they would call it another sign of how you've failed to meet standards. If the new Calabite lost her here, they would call it an unfortunate side-effect of his inexperience, and tell him to do better next time. The standards impossible, eternal, unreasonable. You can't stop for an extra half day in Shal-Mari without them deciding _Valentin is incapable of focusing on a task_ and keeping you on a pawn shop leash for months, when once you could have wandered that city for a week on a half hour errand of no urgency, and come back home to a handful of annoyed memos.

Everyone believes that you cannot, whenever you will not. It's almost enough to make you wonder if they're right.

They are unreasonable. They say _prove you can refrain_ and then weeks later you are still expected to refrain, to prove by not, and a single _yes_ is enough to let them ignore weeks of _no_ , all the balances skewed. They wouldn't do this to you if they ran the numbers. The accounting is unfair.

But then, the entire company has had some difficulty with sorting its responses into the right folders since Daosheng died.

"Life is like that," says the Calabite. Not her. The one beside you. "I mean, not in the abstract sense, but the literal sense. We spend all this damn effort in not dying, and the reward is to keep on trying to keep on existing. There's no point at which someone shows up and says, hey, good job, you've done it, now you can stop worrying about that whole deal."

"Exactly the problem," you tell him. The corners of his mouth move just so, in that way that means he doesn't think what you've said follows on what you were saying before, and that he doesn't care to tell you this. Really, how do they expect you to sort everything back into place, when no else is putting in any effort?

You would expect the company to understand group projects, after all this time. You expected better of many of them.

He is arguing with you about his image again. There are all sorts of excellent arguments you could make as to why he should stop this fussing, but you're not sure which you've already made. It would take too much trouble to look for the details now, so instead you say, "You could simply wear the image of that vessel. Daosheng would have liked it."

"I don't see how her preferences are relevant to our work in the Marches."

"She liked pretty things."

"That would explain all the Impudites," he says, because he still dislikes casual incivility enough to avoid saying _That would explain you_ even if it's what he means. "So why all the Shedim?"

"Chaixin likes useful things."

Leo watched you sideways, his hands in the pockets of the coat you had made for him. He just wasn't the type to appreciate leaving those lines as they were made, or a proper silhouette. "What explains the lack of anyone else?" he asked.

You picked through your answers, because you were distracted by the reasons he might be asking, the direction you had chosen to walk, the creatures skulking nearer in the mist. "Yuliang doesn't like Balseraphs. Lilim are expensive, though once in a while there's a great deal on one, or a way to swipe one that no one's guarding closely enough. Habbalah think they're angels. We already had two Calabim. And nobody likes Djinn."

"Is that so?"

"Most people," you said, with that buzz of delight that came from a chance to push someone just right, "like what's most like them, whether or not they would admit it. Djinn cling to things that are nothing like them, instead. And who wants that sort of thing clinging to them, when they have nothing in common? They lock you up and pin you down and tell you that they love you and forget about you a week later, and it's even worse if they don't forget you. They're inconstant and dogged at the same time. The only people who could like a Djinn are other Djinn, and they know better."

"And here I thought opposites attract," he said, though he didn't mean it. He was making conversation. If he had known to keep quiet, he might not have left so many openings for you--but let's be honest, Valentin, if he had known to keep quiet, you simply would have cut open the entrances yourself.

"Little details vary, but at the core? No. Let's take you for an example." You would hook an ankle around his if you weren't making a point, even while walking. It's the Marches. One can do those sorts of things. "You must get particularly attached to fussy, stubborn little creatures who sneak about and break things."

What a _hit_. He is so full of non-reaction you could laugh all over again, but you might not be able to stop, and you'd rather keep counting the things following you.

"Of course I've read your file," you say, when he hasn't said anything at all, "but I wouldn't have to, just to figure out that much. Zabina should buy you a gremlin. You could dress it up with fuzzy caps and teach it to appreciate all the books you like, and everyone in the company would make a pet of it, at least until it fledged."

They are unreasonable. They invest so much into things that can't love them back. Video games and furniture and architecture and houseplants and interns. Lanthano probably has a cat again, which he can't even suck Essence out of. All of them, Magpies, the fastest and slipperiest creatures who can take anything that comes to their fingertips as easily as that, and they want to hold onto these bits and pieces as if they matter. As if it doesn't all dissolve under your fingernails at the first bad turn.

Artem's hair slips between your fingers while you decide what to do with him. He's such a fragile thing; you could break him by accident, on the corporeal. It's difficult to break anyone by accident in Hell, and you've never quite settled on whether you find that more or less appropriate to the whole, oh, _theme_ of the place. Hell ought to have a more unified philosophy, if it means to have a world that shapes itself to the whims of its Princes. No Domain would skew so wildly back and forth in what it intended to be. But it's always an act of will to do damage, here, and so the pretty little Impudite shivering beneath your hands is as safe as diamonds.

"I'm not criticizing," Wren says. She's an outline where she sits in Artem's desk chair, a silhouette of a Lilim. If Lilith had decided to render her daughters in blue-gray and blacks instead of shades of green, and why didn't she, anyway? It would make Lilim fashion so much more flexible. Perhaps someone should suggest it to her.

"You are criticizing." You put a hand to the back of Artem's neck, and consider kneeling down across from him, face to face. "You're allowed to, after all. It's not like we're working for some small-minded officious place that doesn't believe in arguments. And you're not making a bad point, but what you see as a bug, some people see as a feature."

If your hands weren't on him, Artem might laugh. It's the sort of reference he likes. But here you are, skin to skin with him, and he says nothing at all.

"So maybe I do think it's a problem." Wren's foot swings back and forth, the way a cat's tail would. "They could've been more...careful. In how they did the rebuilding. No one else was marked as fixed while still being like--this." She laughs, short and sharp. "Listen to me. I'm talking about him as if he's not even here."

"If he minded," you say, "he would object."

"Would he?"

You do sink to your knees, and cup Artem's face in your hands. "What do you want, Artem?"

He licks his lips. You are being unfair; you should not be asking questions like this. "I want you not to ask me that," he says, slowly and carefully. He enunciates precisely. "Not now."

"See," you tell Wren, "he's fine. Are you going to come over here and help, or just watch?"

You know which one you'd rather. But unlike Artem, she really prefers that you ask.

Your hands are empty, and for a moment you can't figure out what was supposed to be there. No. Not that, which was memory. Something here in the Marches. Someone? Something. Bits and pieces in your hands. There is an itch at the edges of your mind. One of them got a set of claws into you, and oh, there were other details, tedious bits of slash and bite and shred and one of them staggering away with a quarter of its image vanished under Calabite resonance.

He's angry at you again. Maybe you should listen?

"--killing every fucking thing we meet," he says, "all the way up to the person we're supposed to _bring back_? Do you think you'll be able to keep your hands off of that one?"

So it was a question. "There's a difference," you tell him, "between dissolving a few ethereals that can't leave well enough alone, and harming the target of the job. I've never broken anything I've been sent to steal, Leo. Can you say as much?"

"I could've talked us through that," he says.

"Why?"

Poor kid. He is baffled by the question. All he can come up with on such short notice is, "It would be safer."

"Don't worry," you say. Because he's so nervous already, you dream his lapels straight instead of adjusting them with your own hands. "I'll take care of you. Company policy."


	8. In Which Memories Have Claws

When Zabina told me to run for the hills if Valentin got dangerous, I'm not sure what she was imagining. Something more direct. I'm nervous enough that I've smacked an ethereal around with my resonance directly, just to have an outlet for the discomfort--to be fair, it was trying to savage me at the time--because I can't tell from one minute to the next how safe it is to stay in Valentin's company. They can keep up a perfectly rational conversation for twenty minutes, and then say something that implies they don't remember what we just said. Or that they changed their mind in the last half-second. I'm not sure which is more unsettling.

Unsettling is how they've murdered everything that's so much as interrupted us on this walk. At least they have enough of a sense of self-preservation to avoid attacking a god. So far. It was nice to run into Sobek again, as the old bastard's always been reasonable in his own way, but I'm not sure I should've stopped there. In retrospect, I'm surprised no one died during that conversation.

And by _no one_ I pretty much mean _Valentin_. Apparently they have enough of a sense of self-preservation not to mouth off to an unfriendly god, which is...on reflection more than could be said for _me_. Anyway.

There's a nursery rhyme, or poem, that Katherine used to sing on her better days. She couldn't remember all the words of it, but she had the gist down. _She sailed away on a sunny summer day, on the back of a crocodile..._ The middle got muddled, but the end was clear enough. _At the end of the ride, the lady was inside, and the smile was on the crocodile._

Valentin is a traveling companion who can clear our path. But I'm not sure how long we're going to be working in the first person plural, here.

"Have some faith," they say, even though I didn't say a damned word of that out loud.

"In what?"

"Whatever you like." Valentin waves airily; it's a particularly impressive gesture with the glitter of diamond beads in the lace of their cuffs. There's a French period drama somewhere missing a courtier, and this being the Marches, we may yet walk into it. "This is a land made of belief, so you might as well pick some target for it."

"Is this actual advice relevant to the task at hand, or just sort of a general life suggestion?"

"Take it as you like. You'll find it more useful to want the impossible than to work out what's possible." They offer me a hand, which I don't take. (Mercurians of War who have tried to kill me, yes. Valentin? No. I have my standards.) "You'll want to hold on," they say, hand waiting for me. "We're nearly there."

"How can you tell?" I'm all but lost, which isn't hard to become in the Far Marches, where we are now quite thoroughly located. The mist isn't even swirling helpfully: it's a blank gray we keep walking through. Or in circles within. Would I be able to tell if Valentin were leading me in circles? Not really.

"The slipstream is built out of potential. It's easy to fall into by accident. If you want to use it deliberately, the safest route is to approach from the far side. Lack of potential. Complete blank. Not _darkness_ , which has far too many thematic connotations to be a lack of potential as such." They smile at me like a tour guide. "You might even learn to use it, if you're caught in there alone, but it'd take you weeks and some exciting trips through the parts you wouldn't like, as that's a vital part of the learning process. You should really take my hand before we get there. It'll be less educational, but just imagine what Chaixin would say if I lost you in the Marches."

I am far too tempted to ask what, exactly, she would say.

Sometimes it's best not to find out.

"If you want to get technical," Valentin says, "this doesn't count if _you_ choose to initiate contact."

"If you try to Charm me again, I'm losing you in the Marches."

Valentin's thumb presses into the center of my palm. "I wouldn't need to touch you to manage that," they say. "Now close your eyes, and don't think about anything."

I don't have much faith in Valentin, but they're right; if they decide to make trouble for me, my response can only do so much.

I close my eyes. And we fall into the slipstream.

It's like falling off a building. (Been there, done that, especially of late.) My eyes snap open, and it's a damn good thing Valentin's hand is wrapped around my wrist, because I'm not holding onto them. We _are_ falling, the spires of a cathedral whipping away from us above. Below. We're moving away from them, but the pull of gravity says those spires point down, and we're falling into the sky.

"I would have expected explosions," Valentin says, as if they're critiquing the appetizer at a restaurant. "Is this what you get up to on weekends?"

The cathedral has no end, though its top has disappeared in the distance. We're still falling up and away. "More often two in the morning on weekdays. Fewer people out and about to dodge. So why is the sky here blue?"

"It's not a memory. It's the slipstream. It picks up fragments of what's in your mind, and builds worlds off of them. Watch." They twist neatly around in mid-air, and kiss the pulse at my wrist.

We smash into the ground. Smash _through_ , the stone floor shattering around us. Valentin has landed on their feet, tidy as a cat, with my wrist still caught in their hand; I'm staggering, hand and knee to the ground, blood trickling between my fingers. It's not significant. It hasn't done _real_ damage. But that doesn't keep it from hurting.

We've broken through a desk. This room is vast, and full of furniture piled up in stacks taller than either of us. Possibly I should stand up, but I think if I stand I'll try to hit Valentin, and that would be...inadvisable.

"See," Valentin says. "It doesn't look like that room at all. Can you imagine anyone in the company using one of these?" They idly kick a stack of furniture: student desks, the cheap and sturdy kind made of metal and formica. I've sat in classes at some of those. It's entirely possible that if I checked the surface of one, I'd find graffiti I've seen before.

I'm not going to look. I'm not.

"This isn't getting us any closer," I say, like a fucking professional with his mind on the job.

"It will." Valentin tugs on my wrist, and I finally stand up because--let's leave it there. Focused on the job. "This place is made of transitions and doors. You couldn't stay here for long if you tried, Leo, not when the slipstream keeps pulling you along. If you don't walk through a door, then the floor crumbles or the lights go out or the enemy breaks in." They walk between the stacks of furniture, pulling me relentlessly along. "Eventually we'll hit sand and water, and the door's practically there already."

"So, what, I should--"

"Lie back and think of Heliopolis?" This is not the tour guide smile; this is the one that leads into a dark room and the folds of their skirt spread over my hips. "It's not that easy, though we could try if you've been waiting for an excuse to ask."

At least I'm sure I'm not Charmed, because if I were, I'd be entertaining fewer thoughts of violence. "Why don't you show me how this works when it's listening to your mind instead?"

Valentin pushes a stack of chairs over with one hand. "You don't want that." The chairs smash through the wall; there's another blue sky beyond. "Besides, if it were that easy to control, everyone would use it for travel."

"And people don't?"

"Most ethereals think it's too dangerous." Valentin pulls me through the hole in the wall, into a bright green meadow. It's something out of a picture book: lush grass, willow trees, and a winding trail towards a brook. The sunlight gleams off their hair. "Ethereals are used to the Marches, where it bends to any little whim. Which is nothing like the Symphony, is it? We have to put some effort into making it mind and play our music, so we're far safer here than they would be."

I look back behind us. No sign of the room we left, but my shoes are leaving bloody footprints on the path. "And if we just walked forward without you holding on--"

"You would look back this way," Valentin says, "and I'd be gone. Or cross the bridge and find yourself in a different place than me. Would you rather?" They ask that as if it's an honest question, and one of no great importance.

"I would rather be on this job with almost anyone else." We're nearing the bridge, and it worries me for no reason I can determine. Redwood over a brook I could step across, in bright light, with no space for anything to lurk. Nothing visible, anyway. The Marches don't care much about standard logic, much less physics. "However, just imagine what the Marquis would say if I came back without you."

"She would say that you'd likely done your best." Their fingers are so tight around my wrist that I'd expect bruises, if vessels or souls were involved. "That she couldn't expect you to keep up with me, if I took it into my head to disappear, and that of course you'd done well to finish the job on your own. It would be a very small mark against you, no more than whatever mistake you're bound to make on account of being young and new to the company and working for a Knight who isn't very popular, and in a year's time the story employees would tell each other would be that I ran away and it was just as well, under the circumstances, and a few of them would congratulate you on not being damaged in the process."

They set a foot on the bridge. I don't want to follow them across it. The _not wanting_ is so strong I know it's not my own, which makes it no easier to resist.

My heels are digging bloody furrows into the path. "This is ridiculous," I say, and imagine the banks of the brook as yellow sand. A trivial change to an aspect of the Domain around us, or whatever Domain-like thing this is.

The sand flickers into place. Melts back into the mud that was there before. The bridge in front of me is terrifying the way Princes are, and Valentin stands on it, watching me. "It's not that easy," they say.

"What?"

"Navigating the slipstream. Getting rid of me. Becoming who you think you want to be." They laugh, breathless. It's entirely different from the giggling of before. "Take your pick, but take another step, Leo, just be a dear and do that much."

"Why?" I think I would be running already, if they didn't have that grip on my wrist.

"Because I can't move your way," they say, as if this is logical. Dream logic. Maybe it is. "The bridge won't let me. What's it doing to you?"

"Fucking with my head." The sunlight falls across my shoulders like water. "How about we meet up at the city?"

Valentin breathes out a sigh. "It'll hurt less," they say, "if you just do what I say."

"I've heard _that_ before."

"It's a perfect day," Valentin says. They flick their free hand out, fingers turned just so. "The sun is perfect. The grass is perfect. The sky, the clouds, the breeze, the arrangement of the trees, and if you had the aesthetic sense of a stunned badger you would appreciate it. Nothing in the Marches is perfect unless it's a trap. The slipstream is made for moving, and the longer you stay in one place, the nastier the potential bite. Are you coming?"

"Yes," I say. And I don't take another step. It's like the moment when I stood in front of Michael, and could say nothing at all, and I'm sure there's nothing in the Marches as terrible as the Archangel of War.

Knowing doesn't help.

"Do you want--" Valentin stops, and their mouth flattens. Almost as they looked when Zabina stopped them, that once. "No time." Their grip on my wrist loosens fractionally. "Trust me, and just take one more step forward. It'll be fine."

I'm terrified, and angry at myself for being terrified, and if nothing else, I can trust that they know the Marches. I step onto the bridge.

It collapses beneath us, but at least I'm not _scared_ of the damn thing anymore.

We don't hit water. We walk (we weren't _walking_ , we were falling, yet here we are, foot in front of foot) through an archway into marble ruins. Something Greek, maybe, or Roman; I'm not sure how these things match up. I am not breathing very steadily right now. "Fun, you said."

Valentin pats my hand. "It is fun. You get to see all sorts of things. Is this one yours?"

"I think it's yours," I say. "Nothing very classical in my background."

"It might be a way station." Valentin steps over a gap in the marble floor. There's no sky above us, in a way I'm trying not to think about, so it's probably safer to watch where we're walking instead. "Someone gets caught in the slipstream for a few decades, and they smear out into one of their own images until it turns into a static point. Like a pearl in the oyster. I suppose someone who was determined might be able to map them out, and find routes between them, but why bother? The slipstream doesn't go anywhere on its own account."

"Regardless," I say, "it's not fun. This is levels of not fun, Valentin, and..." My intellect finally catches up with circumstance. "You Charmed me. Didn't you."

Valentin smiles beatifically.

"I'm going to be really upset about that in a few minutes."

"Or," they say, "you could let me keep it running, just like you let me do it to you there, and we could have far more fun on this trip than we would otherwise."

This sounds like a good idea, which just goes to show how much my judgment is compromised right now. "What happens if we stick around this waystation for a while?" The pillars on the other side of this ruined building aren't getting any closer, despite our walking.

"Something fun."

" _Valentin_."

They lace their fingers into mine, and pick up the pace. "Something terrible, if you really want to know. Quick, think of some part of your life you usually avoid remembering."

"Couldn't you do it this time?"

"I don't remember anything the way the slipstream likes," Valentin says.

I'm almost sure that's a lie. What I think about--delicately, generally, because this Domain will revolt if I try to build it myself--are the fires of Sheol. The scent of brimstone and charred flesh. The endless screaming.

We step between pillars into the howl of a school bell. The corridor jags crookedly around us, while faceless children dash past.

"This is cheery," Valentin says. They have to raise their voice to be heard over the bell. "When does that stop?"

"Soon?" A child collides with me, and--that's her hair, her favorite shirt, the sneakers she wore holes through faster than she outgrew, but it's not _her_. I look at the Impudite beside me so that I don't try to watch where she's running. "Your turn to get us out of here."

"There's no rush yet." Valentin leans in against me, shoulder to shoulder. "Take a little time to enjoy the scenery before it bites you."

"There is nothing _enjoyable_ about this."

"It isn't taking anything from you," Valentin says. "You haven't lost one thing you had when you stepped into here. What could you enjoy more than that?"

I want to tell them that not everything breaks. Even for a Calabite. But I'm not sure I could say it in a way that either of us would believe. And don't we have enough convenient lies going on right now?

"Find us a way out," I say. (This isn't memory. It's just working from mine.) "Please."

They fling open a classroom door, and pull me inside. It is a classroom still, even if one wall is on fire. At the chalkboard the figment who's dressed like Katherine has drawn out a diagram for a simple timer-based bomb; she's labeling the parts in Helltongue.

"I'd as soon we found a way out that wasn't on fire," I say.

"There's no intent behind it," Valentin says. "Nothing in the slipstream will hurt you except for the traps, and they're less obvious."

"In retrospect, the bridge was pretty obvious as trap."

"But also as an exit. They do tend to come together." They draw me on toward the burning wall, and we pay no attention at all to the girl at the chalkboard.

Besides, we had whiteboards when I taught elementary school. It's never exactly memory, here.

"Did I mention the Discord," I say, when I can feel the heat from the flames. It's not at quite the right distance, for a fire that big, and it's not spreading properly, but damned if I don't know what the heat of a fire feels like even in a dream.

"Trust me," Valentin says. They pivot neatly on one boot heel to kick out a window. "Right through here, and let's make it quick, because you shouldn't look back and see what's behind you right now."

Well, I know that trick. I don't look back, and I follow them through the burning window.

The flames don't even touch me, but the glass slashes my hands. My hands, when I only touched the windowsill with one of them. There's blood running between my palm and Valentin's, dripping on the floor of some bar. Club. We've walked into a movie set, or into history, with neither of us dressed for the right era.

Valentin alters their clothes as they lead me between tables, towards the stage at the front. "I told Henry that his Djinn would get him killed," they say idly, with a nod to a figment here or there. "Adrian would have done it himself, except that it wasn't politically expedient, and then once there was no political protection left for that poor idiot, well, what was the point? Taking apart someone who had already been reduced to guarding Tethers from the Stygia side would have been some sort of _relief_ , don't you think?"

"I don't know," I say. "I don't really think about it." The air tastes like cigarettes in a way secondhand smoke usually doesn't; it's as if I've just had a drag myself, with such intense memory of my smoking habit in college that I expect the world to change around us again. But it doesn't; there's a woman in a slinky dress stepping up to the microphone, and the chatter around us is dying down in preparation.

"All the same," Valentin says. "I was essentially right." They sit down at a booth, and I take the seat beside them. There are two glasses of champagne waiting there already.

"Surely that's not safe to drink," I say, when they pick up a glass.

"It's not the trap." They have a sip, and smile at me. "It's not the heart of the scene. You can't think of the slipstream like it's a person, Leo, who makes plans and second-guesses itself and looks ahead to consider what you might be expecting. It's an animal, or a machine. A river that pulls you in one direction." Their fingers tighten in mine. "Don't pull away now. It's not safe."

"You--" I can't think of any words strong enough. Helltongue offers several, but I don't really like swearing in that language anyway. It doesn't have the same impact when it's that easy to be horrible in the language. "Why are we taking this route? How is this faster than just looking for a Domain that would give us a simple, common set of items? It's sure as hell not any _safer_."

"I know a dozen places that would have what we need," Valentin says, smooth as ever. The eight-piece band has started the music, and the singer is swaying to the beat. "How many do you think are still there, a century on? How many do you think would like to see me on their doorstep again, with a single Calabite of Theft at my heels, instead of a set of Nightmares? The slipstream is safe and fast and entertaining, so long as you keep close to me and listen to what I say, which shouldn't be all _that_ hard, Leo. Chaixin doesn't hire people who can't follow a few simple instructions."

"You couldn't avoid Charming me for two full days in the Marches, so you'll excuse me if I'm not impressed by--"

"I don't intend to lose you," they say. "Think of the fuss and paperwork back home. You wouldn't have found it any fun at all, what was going to happen next in that lovely grass."

"One of your nightmares?"

"One of my best." They are, I think, legitimately proud of this, or at least they sound so. As if fucking with people's heads in a land where almost anything is possible is a skill to show off. "If we had all the time in the world and you weren't so difficult, I would've taken you inside someone's dream to show you there. You can lie on your back in that grass and watch the sun while everything happens. I could Charm you again, if you'd like."

"Don't you dare."

"I could Charm you again," Valentin says, "whether or not you'd like, but I imagine you'd complain when we got back home, and I am trying to pull up my yearly evaluation scores, so we'll just have to do this the hard way."

The woman on stage begins singing. The men in the audience stand up, and draw guns. "Fuck," I say, for lack of better comment, and Valentin laughs as they pull me under the table.

Do you know what hurts? Getting shot hurts, even if it is, as Valentin helpfully points out, not doing any real damage to my mind and soul, though it's done a number on my clothing. Under the table takes us into a rotting house in the woods which is neither the house where I last met Regan, nor the illusion Inez called up for me when I delivered her a package, though it's reminiscent of both. I track blood out of the house onto a craggy mountainside, where figments of demonlings wail at us and spell out nonsense in sigils every time the cloud of them changes shape.

Valentin pushes themselves off the cliffside, and pulls me down with them. Gravity's pointed the right way this time, and the rocks below are sharp as razors.

The Impudite lands on their feet. I don't.

"When I said it would be fun," they say, as if we didn't leave off that conversation several minutes ago, "I might have forgotten that you don't have much experience with this. How are you feeling?"

"Fine," I say, through a mouthful of unreal blood that tastes just like the authentic type. "It's the most exciting thing I've done in weeks."

"You're a good liar. You must practice." They slide their interlocked thumb and forefinger around my wrist, a single twisting loop that lets them step smoothly in front of me without letting go. "So many domains care for nothing but sight, sound, a little scent... They don't let anything solid do more than feel like itself, whatever you do with it. The slipstream doesn't stint on the details. Would you like me to fix that?"

"I would rather you not touch me, Valentin, and I think I can cope with some imaginary pain."

"See? You're unreasonable about so many things."

"If it were easy to fix, I could do it myself."

"No," they say. "You believe it too strongly." They hold up my hand, and slide their thumb across my palm. The cuts there vanish; the pain goes with them. Even the blood's gone. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. I used to have the same trouble. I spent three months caught in here once, when I'd used it just often enough to think I was better at navigating it than I really was."

"Just stop _doing_ things to me."

"Eventually you realize that nothing is permanent." Their smile is perfunctory. "That makes everything easier." They are lying, which is odd, because I think most of the time when they lie about something it's more manipulative, or they don't know it's what they're doing. That one was deliberate. "We should keep moving."

I follow them, hand in hand. _You should talk to C_ is part of a conversation we've had before. I sort through my options, and I don't like any of them. It's all very well for them to have a nihilistic bent--I've seen stranger philosophies in Hell than that, and less functional ones--but it's not very comfortable for me when I'd like to get this job done. If only they could be thoroughly nihilistic, instead of hanging out in this space a few steps away, where they still care enough to harass other people.

There's a cave in the mountainside for us to walk toward. Very Stygia. The rocks are cutting up my feet as if I'm not wearing shoes at all, and every attempt I make to will away the pain slides right off me. But I'll be damned if I ask Valentin for help with this. God only knows what they'd do with that hint of permission.

"You're limping," Valentin says.

"Thank you, Captain Obvious."

"I imagine that would be a rank in Secrets. They do hate giving out distinctions to people who deserve them, over there. Watch your head, here."

A rock jag slices a line down my cheek, despite my caution. The cave has taken us into a motel room. Cheap. The kind of place I used to spend a night to catch my breath and make plans before I joined Theft or got a partner.

"One of yours," Valentin says.

"You're sure?"

"It's very American," they say, amused. "Look at that carpet." We don't pause here, but keep right on moving, leaving fresh blood smudged across the carpet they have so much disdain for. The door takes us into another motel room, of much the same character.

And the door from that takes us to another, and another, one ugly bedspread after another, twin beds or king beds or a conference room as part of a suite, a handful of rooms and then a dozen, slipping up and down the price scale. Valentin glances at a window with snow falling outside, but keeps moving.

My feet hurt, and I want to sit down.

I want to sleep. It must be the slipstream, because I can't honestly sleep. This is me sleeping, here and now, my vessel still safe in Zabina's wine cellar. The drowsiness and the urge to lie down on one of the beds we're passing are no more real than the fear at that bridge. (And just look what happened there, when I couldn't get past it myself.) I grit my teeth together, and follow Valentin on. Never mind the urge to yawn.

"Are we trapped?" I ask, when we've been through--I've lost count. Maybe twenty rooms. The details change and it doesn't matter, because each one is as bad as the next.

"Not yet," Valentin says. They sound distracted. "I'm looking for a shortcut."

"I thought there was no way to map this place."

They make a choppy motion with one hand. "The windows are giving us options." Which is news to me, as most of them have been curtained off. I do believe this place is reminding me of how much fun claustrophobia can be. "We could keep slipping along until we happen across a useful scene, but this one seems pliable enough to let us move faster. Unless you want to stay in the slipstream a while longer?"

I would like to curl up right in the middle of the floor and close my eyes. I'm afraid that if I check inside that mini-fridge by the desk, I'll find a six-pack of beer I like, and that another door will open. "Just get us out of here."

"What's so bad about all this?" they ask lightly. "Aside from the aesthetics of the place. Those _pillows_."

"Nothing," I say. "What happens if we check behind the curtains?"

They shrug, and fling back the curtains from one window. I know that beach; that was when Zhune and I still tried to take vacations once in a while. There was a safehouse nearby, and nothing of importance happened there worth remembering.

I make the glass go away. Never mind dreaming things away, my _resonance_ still works.

"Good job," Valentin says, with that type of affection that's right next door to condescension, and steps through the window, with me right after.

It's not the same beach anymore. The sand here is a red and gray, nothing like the brilliant white of the place on Earth that I've been, and the sun is rising in what would be the wrong direction over the ocean. Maybe the red sand's only the effect of the dawn, which has painted both of us red. The beach stretches out in both directions further than sight.

A woman walks down by where the tide's coming in. No one I know, at least from how she moves; she's walking away from us, and she may well be another one of those faceless figments that populate these scenes.

Valentin's hand drops off my wrist, and I am so surprised I don't even think to grab it back before they step away from me.

"Is that--" I shut up and I _run_ , because even if they only look to be walking, their every step is taking them further away from me. The beach is receding, and this entire encounter wants to leave me behind. "Valentin!"

They don't look back.

Fuck dignity. I run like I've still got those shoes that let me catch up with anyone, and tackle Valentin at the knees before they can fade out of sight entirely. (The woman is clear, the beach is clear if distant, but they were starting to go, an illusion in the corner of my eye even when I was looking right at them.) We fall down onto the sand together in a graceless tangle.

"That's not--"

Valentin grabs me by the throat.

Well it's a good thing that I don't strictly need to _breathe_ in this place, because I'm not, anymore. I grab their hand, the one that's bloody from holding onto mine, and hang on, while making some embarrassing gurgling noises.

"If you don't let go," Valentin says, sweet and steady, "you might get hurt." They demonstrate by letting go of my throat.

"She's not real," I say.

Their wrist swivels in my grip, and fingernails like claws dig into my forearm. "As if I don't know that."

"She's not real, and it's a trap."

"You say this as if I'm not perfectly aware."

It doesn't actually hurt, where their fingernails are piercing my skin. No blood, no pain, but I can feel it in my _soul_. They are not fighting fair, and they are not threatening to shred my mind, here. And if I let them go and find my way out a week from now, or months from now--

No one would blame me. Not even them.

"She won't last," I say. "The slipstream won't give you five minutes of permanence, even if you believed it was her, and you don't believe. This is nothing but a--picture of her, held out on a string." Their fingers are cutting deep through my arm, and I could just let go. "Valentin, I don't want to get stuck in here. I have a job to do, and Chaixin is expecting both of us to come back."

They pull us upright, their fingers _through_ my arm in a way I don't want to look at, and they point to the place where the water hits the sand. "There."

The woman is walking away from us. She's the one fading, now, as if the horizon is swallowing her up before she can reach it. Valentin stares at her back, and sketches out a series of lines in the air. The whole landscape shivers at what they're doing to that space.

There is a space in the air, between shore and sea. "If you hurry," Valentin says, "that'll take you close enough. Let go of me."

"I can't do this job without you," I say. I can be a very good liar when I set my mind to it. "And the Marquis is counting on us."

They aren't breathing anymore. Nor are they looking at me. But they let me drag them down the beach and through the space, back into a part of the Marches that isn't trying to pull us anywhere.

We stand at the foot of a mountain that starts in a clear, distinct way as no real mountains ever do. Here, the silver sand of the Marches. There, the mountainside, projecting upward at an angle almost too steep for walking. I am bloody and bleeding and not quite yet in danger of losing a Force, and I am _perfectly_ aware, thank you, that Valentin could have pulled one off me if they'd cared enough to try.

They sink down to the ground, cross-legged in the sand, and burst into tears.

I'm not sure what to do with this.

I sit down across from them. "Look," I say, and get no further, because Valentin falls into my lap and howls like--god, this is nothing like with Katherine, who was a human child and had a damn excuse, unlike an Impudite half again my size and centuries older than me. It's nothing like her at all.

If anything came across us right now, I think I might murder them myself. But we get to be alone, Valentin sobbing in my lap while I watch out around us. Patting them on the shoulder doesn't seem to help any. I don't know what _could_ help. Nothing. That's the problem right there, I suppose. Nothing helps. The unfixable problem. You can't fix death, not the true and final kind, no matter what you'd pay or do or trade to get someone back. Gone is gone.

I used to tell Katherine, if you broke it, you have to live without it for a while. Until we get a replacement. And if I broke it, well, I got her replacements sooner, because that was my own fault, and she could keep up a terrible whine meanwhile. I'm not sure what to do when the universe broke it and there's no such thing as a replacement. You just...learn to live with that. Or don't.

They run out of crying eventually. That's how it works. Valentin rests their forehead against my chest, and says nothing at all.

"We should keep moving," I say, though I'm pretty sure we haven't spent three whole days on this trip yet. Plenty of time.

"You are so conscientious." Valentin sits back, and runs their hands over their face, through their hair. They are a picture of perfection. Not a button out of place. "Adrian would love you, if he weren't so busy hating you."

"I really don't care what he thinks about me."

"How nice," Valentin says, as if that's exactly what they wanted for Christmas, and I got it instead. They take a deep breath, and stand up. "You're such a mess."

"It's just surface image." I climb to my feet, and start dreaming myself back into shape. Back into--oh, let me be Leah, for a while, who's now Rachel. I don't want to look like this anymore. Best to look like someone who isn't me at all; it might make it easier to disbelieve what happens to me, when it's convenient. No more blood, no more visible damage, no more clothes that someone else designed for me.

Except I'm wearing an image of clothing Zabina picked out for me, back on the corporeal, so I suppose it always comes down to someone else's decision in the end.

"I meant where I clawed you," Valentin says. They lift a hand up, and then drop it again. "I suppose someone will hold that against me. It's always so difficult to make people understand what I mean, since Daosheng died."

"We should _really_ keep moving."

"Of course." They smile, though it doesn't reach their eyes. "We have a job to do."


	9. An Interlude, In Which Appropriate Questions Are Asked

How could he do that to you?

How could you do that to yourself? That's the better question, Valentin. You very nearly got yourself eaten by a Domain that isn't even sentient. Imagine what your former colleagues would say.

Don't imagine what your current colleagues would say. You're miserable enough as it is. You are wretched and your eyes hurt from the crying, though you could dream that away with a thought. You are wallowing. You should know better.

You did know better. Was that the point? Because if you had the courage to make a statement like that, you would have made it already, but there, oh, maybe everyone could pretend it was an accident. But they would know better. You would know better. _Briefly_ , perhaps, but you would have known better. You knew exactly what you were doing.

You idiot.

Consider the premise, Valentin. You're no dreamling, no figment of another world's imagination. It's possible the slipstream couldn't even digest you properly. Is that the end you were looking for? Spit out in a chewed lump, after it spent a few centuries trying to assimilate you? Or what if it decided one collection of Forces was as good as another, and drank you right in. Built a world out of you. That's not even a proper _end_ , that's just a change. And you didn't like it much the last time your world changed around you.

The first time you had beginner's luck. Someone else's luck, when she found you and decided you were a catch. The second time, well, her luck run out, now, didn't it? Why did you think the third time might go any better? You might as well live with what you have now. Or don't. One way or another, with none of this plausible deniability and accidental dismemberment and the choice you couldn't even bring yourself to make.

Once upon a time you could have made a choice properly. Cut right through that Gordian knot, with the knife of your own mind. It would've been easy to lose the kid, and walk right up to the trap you were (were you? did you even know?) waiting for the whole time through. You're one of those humans who sits in a bathtub cutting the wrong way along their wrist. Pathetic.

Don't you walk away like that when I'm talking to you, Valentin.

You pick yourself up like you have other places to be, and make your excuses. Not even excuses. It's a cover-up for whatever you were just doing (howling your soul out in the arms of a near-stranger, and unlike a proper stranger, you can't dispose of the evidence afterward without a lecture from Chaixin) in the same way you've learned to cover for all the other gaps in conversations and decisions.

When your coworkers say you're broken and staggering and can't be trusted, it is possible they're right.

You really must tell Zabina that she was right, when you get back. The look on her face will almost make up for when she stole your coat.

"Does she have you studying philosophy yet?" you ask the little Calabite at your side, and the look on his face nearly sets you off on a laughing fit again. He finds you untrustworthy and rather dubious. It's a surprise that he hasn't fled yet, and left you to do all the work yourself.

"Not yet," he says. "She said that there was no point in studying philosophy if I didn't begin at its roots, and no point in reading those texts until I could read them in the original language, so apparently I get Plato and Greek all in one go."

"It's a lost cause," you tell him, and leap up onto a rock that he'd find difficult. This mountain wants to be climbed, not flown over, and arguing with its reality isn't worth the effort right now. "Everything is connected to everything else. Her line is as arbitrary as any other."

"Yeah, well, the lines my supervisors draw get to be the ones that I pay attention to. The privilege of rank." He doesn't take the hand you're offering him, but climbs up the rock the slow way. Poor little thing, barely ready for this world. Though it could be worse. Imagine bringing Guo here! You'd carry that one in a bucket the whole way, and tell him such stories, so long as you didn't forget and misplace him somewhere.

Would you do that? Misplace another employee? You shouldn't. It would be an unfortunate black mark on your record. It would. Maybe. Happen.

You are explaining something to Leo about Lilim. Can you figure out where that line of conversation went? Because you've become very good at pretending that you remember where you came from, but the fact is you can't remember what you've said for the last several minutes. Or what he said. You could extrapolate from context. Discussion of his supervisor, therefore of Lilim, interconnectedness, a function of how Geas-trading works and the way one goes on--what Artem called it, a quest chain, for fulfilling Needs, and, yes, there's a logical conversational chain that brought you to this point, but you don't know what it is.

Of course they notice. No wonder they all notice. They won't even accept that you can make it work anyway, when they see what's going on.

"Itimad would understand," you say, and hope that it's on topic enough to--no, you're getting another one of those looks. He's stopped hiding them. Maybe he views them as a sort of corrective. Let the Impudite know when they've jumped tracks again.

She does not rest her head against your shoulder, though you're seated near enough and you know she'd like to. It's not necessary to be a Lilim to know that much, and you learned her ups and downs within a month of her arrival at the company. Her vessel is oh so proper, and so is yours--you've dyed your hair to fit local norms, fingernails still purple-dipped beneath your gloves--and two proper businessmen on the train don't lean against each other. Not at this time of day.

The train covers the sound of conversation, if both of you keep your voices down. No one has sat down across from you. That has been gently, charmingly discouraged. (You're so full of Essence you're just waiting for a chance to use it on something, anything, before sunset. Vehicles are the best place to make noise, and leave it behind for angels to come running at, and find nothing but the railroad tracks.) You lay one gloved hand on your thigh, so very near her without being the slightest bit improper, and ask, "How are you holding up?"

"As well as ever," she says. She's not used to her voice yet, and every time she begins to speak, there's a hesitation in the middle of the first word as she hears herself. Vessels can be like that, almost as much as languages can.

"You don't have to lie to me." You've read her file, seen her deal with the others, talked her through a few encounters yourself. It's like pulling a book off the shelf, to pick a way that'll work with her. A little choice is required, but all the answers are right there on the spines. (The invention of books with spines was one of your favorites. She isn't old enough to remember that happening, but she would have appreciated it too.) The sway of the track sends your shoulders nearly bumping into each other. "You left all sorts of things behind in that life."

"It's not safe to touch any of it," she says. She has learned the company line, which is not quite the same as Theft's company line. The company is not quite a rogue agency--not with the oversight your Prince, your Boss, your Deadliest When Smiling Lord, gives to the Marquises--but there's some divergence, let's say, between Magpie standard and what's in the company handbook. The Magpie standard is _run the risk_ and the company handbook says _don't fuck with Fate_.

Not in quite those words. But essentially.

"Still." You turn your hand sideways on your thigh, and know she's watching the fabric between your fingers shift, and the flex of it across your palm. "Setting aside what we can easily replace--and we might as well, on arrival, there is a relocation allowance--and all those humans we can't steal away without Fate noticing, what are you likely to miss?"

"The city," she says.

You can't steal a city for her. Maybe Daosheng could, or would, if she cared to and asked Chaixin for help. You've heard stories of what they did for a few of the employees, early on, when two Knights or Captains or even Barons might as well do for their precious handful of followers anything that struck their fancy. Might as well clear out old enemies. But these days there are politics. It is so very impolitic to go about murdering the opposition party, without more to show for it to the Prince than _Oh, one of our employees was sad._

Making employees happy isn't what makes Princes happy. Keeping them content, on the other hand, makes for productive employees who don't run off and betray anyone.

You can't imagine anyone in the company betraying you, which is probably a failure of imagination, but there you have it.

"You'll have to think smaller," you tell her, though you're already framing the photographs in your mind. Maybe they'll make the move easier, to see the city hanging on the wall of her new residence. Maybe they'll make the move harder. It's not your job to make employees happy either, but everyone in the company remembers you, one way or another.

She looks at you from her vessel's face, solemn as her real one, and says, "My bird."

"You had a pet?" And here you thought that was Lanthano's quirk alone. Maybe the two of them can bond over ridiculous human affectations some time. She does need more friends.

"A bird in a cage," she said, "in case I ever needed to call my mother."

"I'll steal it back for you."

"I haven't been back in six months. It's likely dead."

"Someone might've found it, before that."

She looks at you archly. How very Lilim. "And what will you do if it's already dead?"

"I'll steal you a replacement," you say, "identical to the first, and never tell you that I made the swap."

"Whatever happened happened to that girl?" you ask.

Leo gives you one of those looks. You may begin to catalog them. Maybe you would file things in the wrong place less often if you numbered and categorized and made some sort of system for recovering the bits of your memory that aren't on speaking terms with you anymore. (In the right story, you would recover them by recovering your relationship with old friends, but how likely is that? You must remember to tell Artem about this theory. He'll like it.) "Which one?" Leo asks.

"The one from your files." The name escapes you. Once upon a time it never would have. "The one you dragged around from the War to Theft, and all across your time in-between."

"Why do you ask?"

Because he won't answer the question directly. Because you knew from the file alone that this would be a button ready for pushing whenever you cared to. Because of the way he tried not to watch the child in that memory. Because he could have anything so small and portable if he asked Chaixin for it, and he hasn't asked.

Because it's exactly like Itimad's sparrow, and you have no idea what you could bring her that would make her talk to you again. To Chaixin. To anyone, anyone at all, even if she never says another word to you.

It would have been so much easier to stay on that beach.

"If I ever meet her," you tell the boy, "I'll steal her back for you."

And he doesn't even appreciate that. But most people don't understand you anyway, Valentin, so this is nothing new, and you may as well keep on putting one foot in front of the other until this job is done.


	10. An Interlude, In Which The Longer You Live The More Enemies You Accumulate

She crouched at the edge of the slipstream. Fingertips in the sand, where she could feel the individual grains--she liked to think of them as the remnants of individual dreams, powdered fine and indistinguishable by the relentless passage of time--slipping a few dozen at a time into the pull of the slipstream.

Not the pull of a nightmare. She knew from Nightmares, and those had far more sense. The slipstream was a nightmare the way a tiger was a villain: only by attributing intent to something that had no such thing.

Qamar thought of herself as a tiger, and stretched her paws right up to the place where the slipstream tried to pull the rest of her in. Her claws left furrows in the sand; when she sat back, human-shaped (as that was always the best and subtlest camouflage in the Marches) the furrows filled themselves in. The slipstream would leave nothing at its own edges to mark its presence. Nothing but the touch. Like a black hole, she imagined, though she'd never seen one in person: dreams of them lacked a certain accuracy, though they made up for it in verisimilitude.

She cast a thoughtful look behind her at Firuze. The Balseraph coiled itself about in impossible optical illusions of loops, currently more an impossible shade of turquoise than a shape. The young did have their pretensions.

"Don't worry," she said. "You're too big to throw in."

Firuze expressed, through coloring alone, how little it believed that statement.

Qamar stood up, stretched. Her hands caught the imaginary air following the sand into the slipstream. "Besides," she said, "what good would it do me? You would never catch them in there. I'd either lose you for half a year, or have to go raise another minion up from familiar."

Firuze allowed that this was a good reason, but drew no nearer.

"Either they know we're following them," Qamar said, "or they're traveling to such an inconvenient entrance this was the easiest way in." She considered asking the Balseraph which it thought more likely. But what would it know? The hypotheses of minions had stopped being entertaining approximately three weeks after she'd first acquired minions, and that had been...oh, centuries ago, now. More time spend having some than not having any, even without counting the familiar she'd led about before her first distinction. Its name escaped her, though she had its name written on the framed woodcut somewhere back in her room in the Tower.

Claws sprouted from her fingertips, retracted, vanished again. She enjoyed the rhythm of it almost as much as how Firuze's color shaded into wariness.

Qamar enjoyed a great many things about her life. 

She sent the Balseraph off to watch some possible exit; it would either take sufficient precautions and report back, or fail and open up another slot for some more junior minion to be promoted into. 

The mist closed around her minion's color. She watched it fade out of vision, and sketched out a brief image before her of how she might use that to good effect inside a dream. The impossible distance was so _done_ , but the dissolution of perception had staying power, when one wished to emphasize the impossibility of connection. Loss was always a quick route to grief; if mishandled, it could tumble into panic or anger. Cheap tricks for children and brutes.

"You've updated your look," said the figment at her side. "Should I follow suit? Is this the exciting new fashion among Nightmares this decade, or merely a Djinn affectation?" They smiled at her, and copied her outfit: snug black from head to toe, a pistol holstered at their left hip for those moments when one needed ready access to the thought of a ranged weapon without pausing to contemplate all the details. "Now we look like friends again."

"No, Valentin," she said, and passed a hand through the figment's head. Nothing but mist. She didn't care to give it more substance. "Now we look as if you're copying my style."

"What do you expect, when you've dreamed me up? I would prefer more color." They held up their gloved hands, and wiggled those fingers. "Your affectation for monochrome was charming enough once upon a time, all stark and subtle at once, but don't you think it's gotten old? You'd look downright goth, now. Or as if you're playing at special forces. Were you thinking of taking up with Baal?"

"Hardly my type." She found her path, and explained to it, even as it fought to give her years of subjective travel, that she had no intention of believing in such a melting of time. The journey would be allowed long enough to let her consider her next move, and no more. "You're the one who sold out your Word to an upstart Prince hardly older than yourself."

"Let's not exaggerate," Valentin said. "He has centuries on either of us, merely as a Prince, and when you start to compare lived experience through multiple instantiations--"

"If I wanted your opinion," Qamar said, "I would ask for it."

Valentin laughed, and turned their head to the side, white-gold hair sliding across their eyes. "When has that ever worked on me?" They put a hand to her arm, and it passed right through. "Did you call me up like this just to finally win an argument with me? There are easier ways. Find the portrait of me. Unless--oh, Qamar, did you destroy it? One of those little fits of pique you pretend not to have?"

"Don't think you were worth that much of a reaction," she said. "It's packed away with all the images of the minions I've lost."

"I don't believe you're so unaffected." Valentin spun on a heel, and their combat boots turned to suede and ribbons. Lace at their throat, pearls at their wrists, coat panels spreading out around them until then stopped short, arms spread in demonstration. "Don't you miss me at all?"

The figment wasn't perfect. They had no scent at all, neither the perfume they wore in Hell nor the sun-on-grass aura they trailed in the Marches. 

"No," Qamar said. "Your salons were pretentious displays of your terrible sense of humor. You always wore too much lace and hired musicians that weren't cutting edge, merely peculiar."

The figment slipped hands about her waist, and she allowed the little dream enough substance to kiss her.

"If we were back there again," Valentin said, "I would get you drunk and braid ribbons through your mane while you pretended not to care."

"If you had any sense as a child," Qamar said, "you never would have become an Impudite. It's a flighty Band that can't be relied on. All surface and no substance."

"We're _Nightmares_ ," Valentin said, and laughed. "Surface without substance is our profession! Our avocation. Our craft, our texne, our--"

"You're not Nightmares anymore."

"No," Valentin said, as easily as that. "That does take some of the fun out of it. I'm just the substance of your memory. You can't even make my dialogue work properly; if I were real, I'd have landed so many more hits by now, and you'd be trying so very hard to pretend you weren't angry or aroused or confused or all three at once. All three at once was the best."

She erased the figment, and set one boot in front of the other, down the path to where she suspected they were heading.

After a time, she remade it. All leather and ragged linen, wild as a Magpie ought to be.

"Just look at this," Valentin said, tugging at their shirt. "You never had any sense of color. Do you really believe Thieves dress this way?"

"The one we caught on the corporeal was."

"Give or take a few centuries of fashion changes..." They leaned against her, shoulder to shoulder, and she allowed the figment enough substance to make that feel like--very little like the gesture once had. "I don't remember what we did with it."

"You do too."

"No," Valentin said, "you do. I had forgotten within the decade. You're the one who obsesses over these things. So _very_ like a Djinn, and listen, you've almost worked out how to get my lines right. You are so close that the distance will be itching at your mind until you see me again."

"I've seen you already." Qamar put her hand around the figment's throat.

Valentin smiled at her. "Not up close, you haven't, now, have you?" Their throat vibrated under her palm with every voiced consonant. "Do you mean to be this uncreative when you catch up?"

"No," Qamar said. She unwrote the figment piece by piece, leaving the eyes for last. "I mean to let myself be inspired by the circumstances at hand." She pinched one eye out of existence, then the other.

She enjoyed many aspects of her life. Some more often than others.


	11. In Which I Learn New Rules

The problem with the steel mountain is that it is, as you might guess from the name, made of steel. And no, the Marches can't just make that be rock but a different color: this place makes metaphors concrete at the best of times. So we hike our way over a mountain made of sharp edges and slick curves, when there's no damn reason for it to be that much of an obstacle.

It's not even a proper _obstacle_ , as I usually find them in the Marches. There's not a damn thing on it to keep us from climbing over, except our own squeamishness--mine, since Valentin doesn't seem to know the concept--as it's cutting a trail of blood out of us. Every slick cliff and jagged piece of trail is simple enough to cross. If you don't mind a bit of imaginary pain.

Imaginary pain feels almost exactly like real pain. Funny how that works in the land of dreams.

But it's not an obstacle. It's just a delay. We get over the whole mountain in about six hours of subjective time, none of it fun and none of it particularly exciting, either. I will _take_ painful boredom over actual emotional trauma or real hazard, if I have to pick between the two, but I'd rather have either. Why aren't there any paths in the Marches that are comfortable and entertaining? It's the land of dreams. You'd think someone would have pleasant dreams once in a while.

The answer, of course, is that all the flower-lined roads with singing birds--the ones that don't lead into some trap--were trampled down by the forces of Purity back when Heaven decided it didn't like having non-human people exist unless they were part of Heaven or enemies of it. Did an impressive job of turning most of the Marches into the latter, and it's a testimony to how diverse ethereals are that hostility to Heaven still isn't the universal opinion around here.

"Valentin," I say, while we scramble down another series of sharp rocks, "were you around during the Purity Crusade?"

They're faster on their feet than I am, and offer me a hand down. They keep on offering, and I keep on not taking the help. It wouldn't make any difference. "Nowhere near. I'm not that old, nor is anyone else in the company, except for possibly Wren. Which we have no way of knowing. Is it the blood?"

"What blood?" I make it down to where they're standing, and imagine myself clean again. Clean, undamaged, not absolutely infuriated with a piece of the landscape. Like that does any good. "I mean, there's a lot of blood to choose from right now. It seems to be a theme."

"On my hands," Valentin says patiently, as if I've asked a very stupid question and they're trying not to hold it against me. "Most Calabim aren't that finicky. It's an unusually young sort of group, when you think about the scope of time from Fall to present, not even taking any of the time before into account. No one should be surprised that it came to this."

"I was just asking about local history." I step past them, and nearly skid down another slick patch of mirror-polished steel. "Fuck. Not about company history, or your theories on everything falling apart."

"You seem a little jumpy, Leo." Valentin's eyes are enormous and luminous. "Is it something I said?"

I spend the next five minutes of climbing in the kind of silence that works best when it irritates someone else. Which it doesn't. Valentin doesn't seem to care if I talk to them, or not, or whether or not I respond. They have their own comments to deliver whether I want to hear them or not. My participation in this game isn't required.

And that was deliberate mockery, I decide. Not that there was much doubt.

"About three quarters of the time," Valentin says.

"What?"

"It's deliberate about that often." They shrug loosely. "You were wondering. Look." They point ahead, in what's a fairly dramatic gesture, but no more so than the Marches require. A wind catches the lace at their cuffs, and I find it equally likely that they dreamed it up for effect, or the environment provided it to give the right visuals. Either, both. Volition is an odd sort of thing in places like this. "We're nearly at the city."

I blink at the mist ahead of us. "If you say so."

"We're well into the Far Marches," Valentin says. "Out here, nothing cares if you believe in it or not." They leap down from the outcropping we've reached, and land some twenty meters down as tidily as any cat, fingertips brushing the sand. So we are at the edge of this mountain. "Come along, then."

What's the worst that could happen?

I mean, I could break my legs, but this mountain has shown no signs of imposing real damage on me. And I've been through worse pain than that--more times than I really like to contemplate, actually. Less so than usual these last several months.

Funny how much less pain I go through as soon as I stop running around with that Djinn and sign on with a proper Theft organization. The kind with an employee handbook and offices with name plates by the doors and property attached to actual Roles and--god, we're not any sort of proper Theft organization at _all_ , but I let other people worry about that. There are at least two layers of responsibility between me and any accusations of doing Theft wrong.

It's odd, I decide, as I leap down. I can hardly imagine Valentin doing any sort of thievery at all. Even though they offered, in one of the oddest moments of kindness I've seen from them yet, to kidnap someone for me. Kindness or harassment: I can't quite tell the difference between the two, coming from them.

I do not break my legs. I don't even land too roughly; gravity pulls just as hard as it would on the corporeal, but I'm always that much faster, stronger, and sharper in the world of the mind than the world of the flesh. Valentin waits two steps away, posed as exactly as Lanthano ever is. It's not _kindness_ that makes them wait for me to catch up: it's obligation. They'll be in a lot more trouble for coming back home without me than the reverse.

Funny how that knowledge doesn't make me feel any better.

"Have you been to many cities in the Marches?" Valentin asks, as if we're the sort of people who have straightforward and useful professional conversations all the time. (Pity it's not true. They clearly know an astonishing amount about this place, and I've never met anyone before who I could really talk about the Marches with.) "Heliopolis, that's one."

"A few. Rainy City, once or twice." I wonder suddenly and absurdly what it would have been like to run that job--that _con_ , if I'm being honest--with someone other than Zhune. Not Valentin, who's predictable only in that they're reliably unreliable. Zabina, maybe. I could've explained the endgame to her instead of needing to con my own partner. Lanthano would've even followed my orders when I started pushing people around under pressure, and accepted my apology for doing so afterward quite nicely. Even Yuliang would've been easier to work with, in some ways, though I don't think she would've enjoyed much of the experience. Too much of it was up to someone else's whims, and she's the sort of person who only likes whims when they're her own. "The outskirts of a few others."

"You came to the Marches as a stranger to the place," Valentin says, "sniffed at a handful of suburbs, and then walked straight into Heliopolis. What a creature you are." They're not pointing at the city anymore, and I still can't see where it is. Away from the mountain. Not here. Nowhere I can usefully walk toward, as a way of shifting the conversation. "Why did you pick that city?"

"I had a local guide, so it's not like I was that much of a--"

"You're avoiding the question because the answer is obvious and it makes you uncomfortable to say it out loud." Valentin takes the cuff of my jacket between their fingers and leads me onward. It makes me feel absurdly like a child, but pulling away would be petty and useless, and taking their hand would be--unwise. Let's call it that. "Maybe it'll serve you well in this place. Nothing in the city will harm you if you follow the rules."

"What are the rules?"

"The rules are the city," Valentin says. "You see the problem inherent in the system." They turn back just long enough to smile at me. "The violence inherent in the system is somewhat more peculiar, but derived from the same principles."

"Please," I say, "be more cryptic. It'll help us get the job done efficiently."

"The first time I came here, I was arrested six times." Valentin tugs me along by my sleeve; I tug my sleeve right back out of their hand, and keep pace with them instead. It's not actually that damn easy to lose track of people in the Marches, even if the mist's unusually heavy around here. "Our sad little Punisher is arrested, more likely than not, which makes us her legal counsel in a way we all might find very exciting."

"If you wanted a lawyer, you should've brought Zabina."

"Yes," Valentin says. "Or Itimad, if she hadn't fallen through the holes in the floor. Do you know, I never wondered before if anyone took care of her bird. I expect it died in its cage, which is so entirely thematic someone must have stepped in and kept it from happening. You don't get theme like that on the corporeal. It's not malleable enough."

"I expect Lanthano took care of the bird," I say, because I suspect this conversation will go somewhere unfortunate if I'm not careful. "He thinks about those kinds of things."

"I'll ask him." Valentin sounds entirely too pleased with themselves at this announcement. "And wherever we go, here we are."

_Here_ is a wall built of stone blocks, each the size of my bedroom. Their surfaces are a slick blue-gray, like wool beneath oil. The walls reach higher than I can see, and just as far in each direction. In the Far Marches a place can be massive simply by deciding that it will be and believing that strongly enough. Someone in this city believes intensely in its magnitude. Quite likely several someones.

"What happens if you get arrested in the city?" I ask, because _Is there a door_ and _Why were you arrested the last time you were here_ both seem like questions that would lead to unproductive answers from this Impudite.

"They'll explain. Unless they've changed the procedure, but they do love their procedure here, rather like your crocodile. Instead of the eating of other people, explanations. I've come to appreciate the difference between the two more in my absence from these places." Valentin steps right up to the wall, and presses a palm against the seam between two stones. "We've come to visit the city. Do let us in."

I wonder if it's possible to Charm a wall.

In the Marches? Quite likely. But the block melts away not as all as if it trusts us, and entirely as if this is a standard response to a standard request. We're left with a modest cubic room bare of anything but an ethereal holding a tablet. It's a human-shaped creature with enormous eyes and a robe that's two folds of cloth and a laurel wreath away from being an actual toga.

"You have reached the City," says the ethereal, "and so the City will accept you, provided that you follow its laws. Will you swear to this?"

"In an instant," Valentin says. "We swear to it. There, and now it's done. Do you still have those little translation lights?"

"Do you speak for your follower?" asks the ethereal, while I'm trying to frame a reasonably safe objection.

"I do," Valentin says. "Do go ahead and hook us up with the usual accessories, so that we can see the sights." They sound far too pleased about all of this. That's enough to make me worry. That's enough to make anyone with sense worry, and I would swear the ethereal even looks slightly perturbed.

But all it says on that point is, "Watch your steps, gentlemen. Your names here."

Valentin etches out their actual true name in Helltongue across the offered tablet. It's made of the same stone that note came on, and scratches as easily as wax with the stylus hanging from it by a perfectly ordinary piece of string. This seems like a great way for some enterprising ethereal to start selling demonic names to sorcerers--but I suppose Valentin wouldn't be much bothered by that. I imagine Valentin would be greatly amused if a sorcerer actually called them up, and I'm not going to think about the likely results at great length.

I write my name below Valentin's, but in English. It sounds almost exactly the same in either language. If being a minion gets me out of making official promises about following the local laws, I can play minion for a while. I've gotten a lot of practice with that from Regan in the past and Zabina much more recently.

The ethereal draws a thumb-sized disc of light from the air, and presses it into the middle of Valentin's forehead. "May your time within the City be less troubled than before."

"You're the same one," Valentin says, delighted. "I thought it was dead."

"I am a manifestation of the will of the city," says the ethereal, with a kind of one-shouldered shrug, and I remember the eyeless avatars of the god of whales. Of course all of the ethereal domains that persist have their own sets of rules. You have to believe in _something_ to hold on for centuries out here. It's a wonder the Game has never made it out into the Marches, that I've heard of.

The ethereal turns to me with another disc of light. The disc feels exactly like oiled stone, a sensation I imagine I'll be quite sick of within the hour, where it touches my forehead.

There's a wall behind us, when I look back.

"May you be illuminated," says the ethereal, and for the first time I realize that it's not speaking Helltongue, or English, or French, or any other language I have a passing familiarity with. That verb form just did something I'm not sure Helltongue _can_ do, at least not that succinctly, and English is failing to capture the nuance. So it's a Domain that translates, and that's both convenient and not so great for any surreptitious planning we might want to get up to.

"May you survive longer than your predecessor," Valentin replies, in the same language.

I'm not actually sure whether or not that's a threat. But I'm pretty sure I know what happened to the iteration of this avatar that Valentin met last time.

The wall on the city side melts away, as if it was never anything but another type of mist. And as we step out of the customs office (or whatever they call this kind of border security here) our respective discs lift up and begin to spin. They're _orbiting_ us, like tiny glowing moons.

"This is going to be amazingly annoying," I tell Valentin.

"They'll arrest you if you try to get rid of it," they say.

I step foot into the street, and take a moment to look over the city. Or, as they'd have it, the City.

I'd expected something either blockier or more soaring, but all the buildings that line the wide boulevard ahead of us are constructed in a sort of neo-classical style. Pillars, porticos, shallow steps, the kinds of walls that expect everyone inside to be looking inward, not out. The city isn't built entirely out of the same stone, which is some relief: it's mostly shades of blue and gray, but at least there's some variation in texture and material among the stone choices.

Every square centimeter of architecture is covered in writing.

I look down at my feet. The symbols are meaningless. Then the disc spins past my eyes, and I'm standing on _If a man bring an accusation against a man and charge him with a capital crime and cannot prove it, he the accuser shall be put to death._ The frame of the window to my right says _If anyone deceives a neighbor about something entrusted to them or left in their care or about something being stolen_ \--

There are a few hundred ethereals in sight, or figments filling out the crowd, and I damn near walk into one because I'm trying to read the laws. It's habit, really. See text, read text. But it's everywhere. The streets and walls and pillars and even the tree of stone that's providing a sort of theoretical shade from this place's sun, they're all etched with laws. And so much of it is just about nonsense, or irrelevant to most people: laws about stud fees on bulls and the construction of houses, selling daughters into bondage and accidental murders. I back up to finish reading the text emblazoned over a portico ( _The setting of the sun shall be the extreme limit of time within which a judge must render his decision_ ) and run into--Valentin, this time, wearing a thoughtful expression when I thought they'd be amused.

"This is like walking into Hades," I say.

"Worse," Valentin says. "Hades has loopholes. This place was built on a different sort of law, and you'll find that corner cases are all accounted for."

"There are always new situations," I say. "Life's too complex to account for every possible permutation of interaction, and to regulate it all."

"Where do you think they get new buildings from?" Valentin breaks into a smile like sunlight in a dream that's going to devour me. "I was responsible for an entire theater on my first visit. We should visit it before we pick up our charge and move along."

"Speaking of which--" I take shelter under the stone tree, where pedestrians are less likely to push past me. I don't like having strangers shove around me; it makes me nervous about pickpockets, even though I'm barely carrying anything worth taking. "How hard is it to get out of this city, now that we're in?"

"Anyone not under arrest is a citizen of the city," Valentin says, "and any citizen of the city can leave the city, though doing so renders him no longer a citizen."

"Him?"

"They have charmingly restrictive views on gender here," Valentin says. "Everyone is male, according to the legal code."

"So that law about daughters--"

"It's difficult to violate a law without the nouns to fill out the sentences, isn't it? You'll notice a lack of bulls and shipwrights around here, as well." Valentin waves an airy gesture toward the crowds passing us. They're more human than the ethereal in the room, but with enough variations to remind me of Heliopolis: a city with a strong theme that's accepted ethereals from distant places as well, so long as they try to stay on theme. Robes are the majority uniform, but there are plenty of people dressed more strangely than either of us in here. A woman with the ears of a cat and the dress of a lounge singer, a man on stilts, a glimmer of someone robed from head to toe in shining black. "There are plenty of laws that aren't punishable by death, if you were wondering. They're simply not as likely to be written in the central streets and markets. If you're moved to poetry, though, try to restrain yourself."

"Poetry is punishable by death?"

"Only certain types."

" _Which_ types."

"Let's not get weighed down by the petty details," Valentin says. "We're in the city. We should go to my theater, find out what sorts of plays they're holding, and throw things at the worst actors."

"Maybe you should give me a rundown of the relevant laws punishable by death before I accidentally break one--"

"Don't worry about it," Valentin says. "You're not a judge, sorcerer, murderer--not of anyone here so far, so it wouldn't count--or traitor or cultist, and you haven't any relatives to murder in the first place if it came to that, you're not selling fradulently or buying under false pretenses, you don't even _own_ a violent quadruped, and so long as we don't congregate at night, it'll be fine."

"What's wrong with congregating at night? Is that when the poetry comes out?"

"When the sun sets," Valentin says, "he can't see his people upholding the laws he's made for them. And so it makes perfect sense, if you're in control of an ancient domain of great prestige and mystery that all sorts of people have fled to for refuge during the crusade, to not let people go wandering around committing crimes when you're not there to watch."

"Or he could just not set." I glance up at the sun. It looks exactly like you'd expect the sun to look, except for not hurting my eyes in the slightest however long I watch it.

"If he didn't set," Valentin says, "he wouldn't be a sun. Let's go to the theater, Leo. It's a much better place to talk."

To plot, I suppose. And having been given a coherent and reasonable suggestion by someone who's been here before, I suppose I ought to try following it.


	12. In Which We Check One Task Off The To-Do List

The theater visit gets cut short because one, the entrance is currently locked, and two, every rule I see on the wall references the use of mind-altering resonances. Do I want to see the stands and stage inside? Oh no. Which turns into an argument, but not a very long one; Valentin's lost some coherence again, and can't keep track of their own line of debate for more than about two exchanges.

Which is a problem in its own right. But I don't feel like there's time to worry about that just now. I can deal with the locals well enough to find us a table in a wine shop, which is serving, despite the name, a sour beer you could sell for unreasonable prices as an authentic ancient recipe, with an appropriately pretentious name attached. I swap one Essence for two cups of it--ethereal domains tend to appreciate it when you keep to theme--and a table far enough into the back that it has a modicum of privacy.

Not real privacy, though, so I sketch up some sound-muting around us, and make it two-directional to test that it's actually working. The domain doesn't object; I can't tell if that's because we're out of the sight of the sun (surely it can't only hold people responsible for crimes committed outside--no, I'm thinking too literally, under the sun just means in the daytime, here), or because I'm not doing anything too far-reaching or visually unthematic. A surprising number of domains will let you fuck around with all sorts of setting details if you keep it out of general view, and they tend to allow negatives where they wouldn't positives. I might get someone coming in here to complain if I piped in orchestral music (or worse yet, the kind of music Regan listened to in college), but a little more silence than usual? Barely noticeable.

And a lot more useful to us.

"Where did you learn that?" Valentin asks. They've been stone-cold serious since we left the theater. That means something, and I don't know what, so I'm mostly dealing with it by not thinking about the problem. Some issues can't be dealt with until they show up with a name badge on.

"I'm not _completely_ inexperienced in the Marches, you know." The pockets of my current coat are not only deep, but somewhat larger on the inside than the outside, courtesy of Valentin fucking around with my clothes. But it's handy for holding little artifacts I didn't particularly want to show off to strangers on the trip. I set the compass between us on the table, with a cup of beer blocking line of sight to most of the rest of the room.

Our voices seem too loud, with the rest of the room on partial mute. I adjust the volume in one direction, and add the slightest hiss to the filter on what comes out of our side. We may look like whispering conspirators, but we shouldn't be intelligible to casual listeners. A reasonable compromise. (If there's a law against whispering in wine shops that don't sell any damn wine, I haven't seen it yet. The tables in here have no text on them, so I can stop reading laws for a moment if I remember not to look at the floors or walls.) With the adjustment going on, it takes me a moment to realize that Valentin hasn't responded to what I've said. They're merely watching me, unreadable.

"If our target's just living here until someone comes to pick her up," I say, "we can track her to her doorstep and invite her along. But 'trying to get out of here' doesn't sound like she's just sitting around enjoying the scenery. What happens when they arrest you but don't kill you?"

"They try to keep me locked up, and rather fail," Valentin says.

I'm using the wrong language for this, so I switch to a different one. Not the local one, though I suspect I _could_ use it, but I don't trust any language I haven't had a chance to work through myself. (What are the chances that these annoying little lights orbiting our heads are reporting every word back to the sun? Moderate, I guess. Seems like a lot for an ethereal to track, even a powerful one. Valentin didn't say the sun was a god.) "What happens when they arrest someone who _isn't_ you, and the penalty isn't death?"

"Something dull." Valentin picks up the cup of beer, while I lay a hand over the compass behind it. "This is exactly the same as the last time I was there. Given the malleable nature of the Marches, I expect all domains eventually settle into either complete stasis, with variations only occurring in those squishy little places necessary for the theme to keep breathing, or develop a rapid chaotic nature that oscillates within the general framework--"

"You're avoiding the question," I say. "Valentin."

They look a little surprised. Not because I've said something incorrect, but because they didn't expect to get called on it. "It _is_ dull. You sit in a little room reading through the laws until you know them well enough to recite any law they ask you for, and then they let you out."

"Six times?"

"I have a very good memory. Sometimes I even waited for them to ask for a law."

"So what's the problem?"

"None." They put the cup exactly where it was before, empty now. "We'll retrieve the Punisher and deliver her home. There's no problem."

I flick at the disc spinning past my eyes. (Doesn't help. Doesn't even slow it down.) "There's a problem. Peculiar as your usual self is, you're not acting like it in here, and I want to know what's wrong before it gets in the way of the job."

"One day," Valentin says, "the sun here won't rise in the morning. How long do you think it will take before anyone dares step outside?"

"What do you think is going to happen to it?" Because it's not going to be us, doing that. We're not a domain-shaking team. Small extraction unit, tops. Like running with Zhune again, in some ways, except we never kidnapped people. Not really. It was one of the few lines I managed to keep drawn--and this isn't kidnapping, anyway, it's a rescue mission, which I've done before, so I don't know why I'm even thinking about that.

"There are holes in the floor," Valentin says.

They don't seem inclined to elaborate on this statement.

"Right," I say, and swig down more of the sour beer. "Let's throw the Essence at finding this Habbalite, and work out what we're going to do from there."

"One day," Valentin says, hand laid flat on the table, "you will walk _right_ into one of those holes, and don't pretend I didn't try to warn you."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"I _know_." They toss their head, and go back to being--an Impudite, pretty and posed and unthreatening, no matter what I know. "What clever starting plan did you have in mind, for retrieving our little lost bird?"

I tap the stone note up against the compass, and shove Essence into it, enough to make it point towards the writer of the note. "Plan A."

#

I walk up to the official who sits at a long table in front of the prison, and say, "I'd like to speak with someone inside."

"Only logographers and relatives may speak with the prisoners," says the official. "Which are you?"

"One of the two options," I say. "May I pass?"

"What about your companion? Which is he?"

"The other."

The official makes a note on his tablet, and then turns it to us for signing in. We do so, just as we did at the entrance. Behind him the prison explains dozens of laws, mostly having to do with the fraud and violation of religious precepts. I wonder which type the Habbalite broke.

"Which prisoner do you want to speak with?"

"Delta," I say, having come up with no clever way to find the right person without giving out her name. Maybe it's not her true name, anyway. If she was hiding here under an assumed identity we were supposed to respect, she should've said so in the note.

There's a great deal of consultation of tablets before the official nods. You'd think they would've figured out paper, by now. But however oddly Valentin said it, they were right: ethereal domains do tend to be traditional and stuck in their ways, as a self-preservation technique. Changing too fast is a way to lose image, Essence, and thus existence.

This place isn't too traditional to work on a grid system, though. We're directed to cell 3-by-9, out of what seem to be 100 cells. Most of the ones we pass are empty theoretical boxes, pillars defining a space with no other walls. An ethereal more tree than human curls up over a stone tablet in one, staring intently at its surface.

Cell 3-by-9 holds what must be our Habbalite. She's dressed in the local style, linen robe and thin sandals, hair pinned back into complex braids with a golden clasp in the shape of a spider. She's all delicate black against the stark white of her robe: ethereal in the way they'd use the word on the corporeal, while looking entirely human. Mostly human. A little too good to be real.

She looks up, and drops her slab of laws. "Valentin!" She's on her feet, hands pressed up against the empty space between pillars. There's a barrier there, even if I can't see anything but empty space. "Did one of the messages get to you?"

"Hello, Delta," Valentin says. "What happened?"

"I broke some silly little law, and I've been in here for so long." She has a brittle laugh. I don't think she's even noticed me yet, standing at Valentin's side, or dismissed me as irrelevant. "Every time I have enough Essence, I send another note. One after another. It's been--I've lost count, but that doesn't matter now. You finally came for me."

"What happened?" Valentin asks. They're being patient, direct, and focused. I know by now what a bad sign that is.

"Never mind that," I say briskly. "We get out of this city, then all the debriefing happens. I assume you're not in a position to just wake your vessel, or you'd have done that already."

Delta clasps her hands behind her back, and considers me uncertainly. "Baolan?"

"Nope. I'm new. I'm also trying to solve this problem, so about how much longer do you expect to stay here if we don't work something out?"

"I don't know. _Forever_. I've read through every law, and every time they ask--" Delta takes a deep breath. "I only meant to stay here for a few months. Until things were quiet enough that I could get to the company. I had to sneak down a Tether, so I de-manifested my vessel as soon as I got to the Marches."

"How did you expect to get _out_?" I ask, like I haven't done the same thing myself, or near to it.

"I thought the Marquis would fix it," Delta says. "She will, won't she? She sent you."

"I have an idea," Valentin says brightly.

"Give us a minute," I say, and flash a smile to Delta. Then I drag Valentin away by the sleeve before they can start to explain their idea.

"Don't you feel that--"

"No," I say, my grip firm on Valentin's sleeve, which has too much lace for this domain. More than a sleeve ever needs, in my opinion. "Whatever idea you have is terrible and likely to lead to someone dying. Since I'm a someone, I'd like to avoid that chance. I would also like to avoid any plans that result in fleeing the domain with the minions of an angry domain master following us."

"They don't go past the walls," Valentin says. "Speaking from experience."

I lean against the wall of this prison, and consider an empty cell. "And do you know how to get three people safely and quickly through the walls of this city, when the sun has decided we're criminals?"

There's just the slightest pause before Valentin says, "Easily."

"No."

"I didn't even--"

"Any plan you came up with that quickly," I say, "is a _bad plan_ ," and I have the horrible feeling that I have someone found myself in the position Zhune used to. With this ridiculous partnership. Since when am I the one criticizing absurd approaches to problem-solving?

Since we got the Marches, I suppose. The land of dreams has its own logic, and it's not as amenable to certain types of creativity as the physical world is. This is a world of laws, and the laws matter here the way physics matter on the corporeal.

Valentin is watching me with the most peculiar expression. "That's the problem," they say.

"We're not in that much of a rush, so we can take more time--"

Valentin flicks a cutting gesture across what I'm saying, that's nearly as effective as speech on its own. They have very communicative body language in the Marches. Clearer than they do in Stygia, which is interesting in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's like the way I can tell when Guo is in a host he doesn't feel as comfortable in as another, or that someone's wearing a vessel they don't use often, or that they don't like. Except the reverse, because--oh. Of course someone who came from Nightmares would be more at home in the Marches. Not just knowing the place, but feeling about it...the way I do about the corporeal, I imagine.

"The problem," they say, slowly, as if they're trying to put something complicated in small words for my benefit, "is the communication gap. I used to be there in the center, and all of them look away now. No one wants to look at the ground." Their hands make two sharp motions. "Do you understand?"

"No."

"At least you admit it," Valentin says, and smiles at me. "What's your plan?"

Well. That's a good question.


	13. An Interlude, In Which Many Laws Are Consulted, To Varying Degrees Of Utility

Once upon a time every piece of gossip in the company slipped into your ears or reflected off your eyes, and while you were, of course, perfectly aware of the change in how information reached you ever since people took one minor slip in control entirely the wrong way, you cannot escape the sudden realization that you should have been expecting this.

You _did_ read the file, and you've watched now and again as the Calabite sweeps through Stygia, a leaf caught in the wake of Knight or Marquis, and you came to a few interesting conclusions, and it never occurred to you that he would switch, as easily as all that, from the fussing of a minion who wishes to make a point of his own existence and nature and unique self, to outright command. But it was there. You should have seen it. You're sure the others have. They knew, and _no one told you_ , Valentin. No one tells you anything anymore.

"Or a cow," Leo is saying, pacing back and forth along the edge of the prison. He's not interested in the people in the cells, in that particular manner that says he has decided not to care about something that would otherwise distress him. He is a Calabite who is very easily distressed; this is almost outside your experience. Certainly the company has never held such creatures. Why would anyone want an explosive demon who couldn't keep his temper inside the walls?

Because he is useful to the Marquises, and you mean to ask Chaixin some questions when you get back. She might tell you things. She might. If you asked.

You are almost afraid to test this.

"Tell me about cows," you say.

"There are laws about cows." The Calabite is very impatient. Perhaps he explained this already, when a different part of you was listening. "If we can convince the domain to redefine her as cattle, then we can invoke the laws regarding cattle that's gone astray, or gored someone else's cow, something like that. The important point is to establish possession. The rules for what the state can do with the property of citizens are completely different from what it can do with citizens themselves."

"It isn't a state," you say. "Strictly speaking, the term--"

"So if she's not a cow, or a coin, or a house," Leo says, "because I don't think we can actually bend the rules here far enough to convince anything that she's inanimate, we have to convince the city that she's female. There are all these rules about women. You'd think that would be close enough."

He really believes he's in charge. Surely Chaixin would have said something.

Maybe she thought you knew. What a nasty little idea that is, like one of those formless demonlings good for nothing but restaurant fodder and entertainment on a short walk outside company offices. There is no such thing in this world as omniscience, you pretty little Taker, you should know that, and you know that she doesn't always know, and did you know that maybe she didn't know you didn't know? Maybe it has been perfectly obvious to everyone else, and she said it outright, to make sure, when you were...

You have been quite distracted lately.

"That's no excuse for being rude," you tell Leo.

"I am trying to fix this," he says, "and you keep giving me the most impractical solutions. I want to get home with all my current Forces still attached, and while I realize you have a few more to spare, I'd rather not bring you back smaller than you were when we left."

It would be nice to know what solutions you have already made, so that you won't repeat yourself, but it seems impolitic to ask now. No. That's not the right word. You are not _political_ in any sense beyond that of office politics (and let us be frank, not even that anymore), or you never would have signed on with Theft while standing in the middle of Stygia's endless Factions wars. Politics has placards, and you didn't find those to your taste.

You will not ask now because if you make too much known about what you don't know, then this twitchy little Calabite who never should have been sent out here to such a dangerous place, not in your company, surely Chaixin knew better--you have put an asterisk there, to come back to this thought later--well, he might stop telling you things.

The holes in the floor will kill anyone, everyone, sooner or later, but the communication gap is becoming downright inconvenient.

"I don't see how that's relevant," Leo says, and you don't know why.

You are not like him. You are not distressed at every minor difficulty in the course of an assignment duly handed to you by your Marquis. However, you have become somewhat concerned about the way this conversation is going.

The clerk at the front of the prison, who is hardly more than a figment, a tiny simple thing you could tear apart without needing to pause in your conversation, hands you an enormous book. The clerk acts as if you have just said something clever, and a little worrisome. This may be true. You pass the book to the Calabite, who probably ought not be entrusted with anything important or fragile, but you can't imagine what anyone else would want with this thing.

"Do you want to go reassure her that we're coming back?" Leo asks.

"I can't see where the entertainment value is in that," you tell him, and he nods, as if this made sense. Maybe this did make sense.

He thanks the clerk nicely--such a polite creature, when he's not talking to you--and you follow him, for lack of more interesting options, to a quiet place beneath one of this domain's very dull trees. There is a clever trick with the sound, and some discussion of this and that, nothing exciting, it's all about laws. You've never much cared for regulations. If they're not bound into dissonance, or given by your Marquises, why bother with them? Every rule can break if you know where to twist it. Every man has a price, Adrian used to say.

If Adrian were here now, he would set this all in order, and you would admire the order and complicated it, and he would pretend to be upset, and you are suddenly desperately tired of this verb mood.

"This would be easier," Leo says to you, sounding almost as tired as you know other people to be, "if I could trust you for five minutes out of my sight."

"I was pulling apart Domains for the nougaty center before your Forces were glued together, Leo."

"I'm sure. And since we're definitively _not_ pulling this Domain apart, we'll have to do this the hard way."

"Do you think we'll all live through it?" You are full of academic interest. Perhaps when you return to Stygia, if such a thing ever happens at all, you'll write about this. A letter to Adrian, slid under his door, would surprise him a little. You haven't done anything like it in years.

"Depends on what the penalties for fraud are," Leo says. He throws you the book, and you catch it only because it would look ridiculous not to. "You can look them up, if you like, on our way back."

It's a pity he won't accept any of your suggestions. You haven't brought down a city since you left Nightmares.


	14. In Which We Game The System

My exceedingly clever plan relies on two things: a Domain willing to accept true statements as true, and the ruler of it not actually wanting three demons kicking around inside any longer than possible. It would be much easier if we could just ask Delta to take the shape of a cow, and then point at her and say, "Look, you have my cow!", but that's impossible for two reasons. First, the city cares very little for what people look like physically when deciding what they are; second, our entrance to the prison declared us both citizens and one of us a relative to her, and cattle cannot have relatives that are citizens. It only stands to reason.

The whole place is built on writing. Every time Valentin and I give our names and have them written down somewhere, that's a little bit of official proof that some statement has been accepted, even if it's not as solid as the laws that make up the streets and walls.

It takes me fifteen minutes to find a stately building of blocky columns that purports to hold records of professions. Another twenty minutes of asking nicely for directions, and standing in line, and we get to a table with a clerk who looks perfectly identical to the one at the prison. I suppose it's a stock type around here.

"I need to register my friend's profession," I say to the clerk. "They're a logographer."

The clerk peers at both of us, and consults a series of tablets. "Has he written a speech that has been delivered within this city?"

"I gave an excellent defense speech at my trial," Valentin says. They seem to be having far too much fun for all of this, which makes me nervous, but I'm coming to accept that my default state around Valentin is _worried_ , whether they're behaving at the moment or not.

"Did you write it down beforehand?" asks the clerk.

"Quite extemporized."

"A logographer," says the clerk, tapping his finger to the book in front of him, "writes speeches."

I imagine a writing tablet, and a stylus to match it. When I've convinced the world that these exist, I hand them to Valentin. "Show the nice clerk how you write speeches, Valentin."

"Does it have to be a good one?"

"As the clerk said, a logographer writes speeches. We have made no claims that you're a _good_ logographer. Write me a speech."

"You could step out of line," the clerk says, "while you're getting that done."

"Is that mandatory?"

"...no," the clerk says, "it is not technically mandatory, merely polite."

"A good logographer," I say, "would probably be polite, but we've already established the degree to which we are or aren't making claims about the quality of this profession." I take the tablet from Valentin, and hold it where the clerk can see it as I read. "This is the beginning of the speech which I will be giving, in which I demonstrate that I am in fact giving a speech that has been written. In the second part of the speech, you will see that I have delivered an introduction to a speech already, and will be supporting the statements of my introduction with actual proof. This is now the body of the speech--"

"He's a logographer," says the clerk, "though I wouldn't try publishing that one."

"And after I put so much work into it," Valentin says.

I don't leave the line until the clerk has written Valentin's name down in the list.

#

The line to register a complaint about the enforcement of laws is surprisingly short. Either the locals are very law-abiding, or no one thinks it's worth arguing the point when they do break laws. An animate tree draped in white robes argues with a great many frondy gestures at another city official, identical in general appearance to the last few but looking far more bored.

"I have an idea," Valentin says, while we stand in line.

"Am I going to like this idea?"

"Are you likely to listen?"

"I'm going to take that as a no." I take a step forward as the tree storms away, its personal law-sphere sending flickers of light across the room every time it swings through the leafy foliage of the ethereal's head. "I'd like to register a complaint."

"What's the nature of your complaint?" asks the official, not even bothering to hide his yawn.

"I have been unlawfully prevented from exercising my rights, as oldest and closest male relative in the city, towards my sister."

The official blinks, and sits up a little straighter. "How so?"

"She has been imprisoned for an infraction of the law, when it's clearly _my_ right to deliver punishment to female members of my household for any non-capital crimes." I take the law book from Valentin, and start flipping to the appropriate section. "You see--"

"I know _all_ the laws," says the official. "I am aware of the one you reference. However, anyone imprisoned here is a citizen, and all citizens are male. So the person you reference can't be your sister."

"She is indeed," I say. "I can make a statement to that effect."

"Statements of the nature of relationships between individual citizens are not, themselves, evidence."

"And yet."

The ethereal leans back, folding his arms. "Do you want to take this to court? Really? A speech is one matter, but in the court we deal with the truth. There are penalties for frivolous suits, you know--"

"I know. I read the book."

"Skimmed, really," Valentin murmurs.

"I read _that_ part." I smile as brightly as the Impudite usually does, though I try to look a bit less predatory about it. Not my Valefor smile. Just...friendly confidence. "I'm willing to take it to court."

"Very well." The official claps his hands, and there is a rather dull period of standing around awkwardly while assistants run back and forth looking through records and bringing official things up to be sworn to. I have a court date in half an hour, and the man looks rather smug about this point. "Now, if you want to write a speech..."

"Don't worry," Valentin says. "I have that part covered."

#

I had not anticipated that the court would insist on having Valentin in the courtroom with me. It's not even a room as I expected, but something more like half of a basketball court, with stone bleachers on two sides and a judge's podium at the third. Defendant's associates to the left, prosecutor's to the right, and the judge in the center.

There is a small cluster of interested ethereals to my right; law courts are a spectator sport around here, but not a popular one. Valentin sits on the bleachers my left, chin propped on their hands, the very picture of avid interest. I think I would've preferred if they had chosen to feign sleep, or coerced some ethereal into sitting in there as my token supporter. It makes me wonder who Delta had sitting on her side, when they sentenced her.

The judge wears a sun mask, and the hems of his robe are embroidered with city laws. They don't really go for subtlety in their symbolism, here.

"The petitioner will advance," says the judge. _Says_ in that there are words, more audible than written, conveying something from that direction; it's the nearest to that dream quality of impossibility that I've seen in this city so far. I didn't exactly hear that, and I'm sure I didn't see it spelled out. I'm just aware of the statement in a way I wasn't before.

It's honestly a bit unnerving. You'd think I'd be more used to that sort of thing by now, but a lot of the Marches goes for a solidity that belies the whole 'world of dreams' thing the place has going for it. Turns out that even ethereals like to walk on the ground and talk out loud with real words. Most of the time.

I step forward with my most professional smile. It's one I haven't had much chance to use lately; Rachel the bored rich woman doesn't have a use for it, and it almost never came up in--I almost said "in Theft", as if I weren't still in it. While spending time with Zhune, let's say. He really wasn't one for long-term cons or a lot of playing at roles. Not the kind that faced out to humans for long.

"You will enter your statements," says the judge, exactly as before. I can get used to this, surely. "Then we will render a verdict."

I was hoping for a phrasing that was less "verdict" and more "ruling", but I'll take what I can get. "I wish to call upon established city records," I say.

"Remind them that indexed records are anachronistic for their assumed technological level," Valentin shouts from the stands.

"Contempt of court," the judge says. Its inflection doesn't vary, and if it's as annoyed as I am right now, I can't tell by its...communication technique. "Fine of three Essence. The bailiff will extract the fine. The petitioner will proceed."

Valentin folds their arms across their chest, and mutters something I'm just as glad I can't make out in detail from where I'm standing. I'd rather get out of this with as much Essence as possible attached; it's a long walk back to...however we've decided to get back home.

"Let the city record show," I say, "that my associate and I visited the prisoner named in the petition earlier today. Is this a valid city record?"

There is a moment of silence from the judge. No records being visibly shuffled around, this time: just a still figure in front of me, with that expressionless sun mask, while Valentin whispers at the bailiff sent to collect their fine.

"Valid," says the judge at last.

See, I can get used to indescribable forms of communication. Just takes a few sequences of back and forth to be expecting speech that's more like the memory of its content than sounds I interpret into meaning.

"Let the city record show," I continue, because some of this is finicky, "that the prisoner has only been visited today by a relative and a logographer. Is this a valid city record?"

"Valid." That answer comes much faster. Maybe the anachronistic indexing system helps.

"Let the city record show that my companion is a logographer."

"Indicate your companion."

I point to Valentin, who waves back helpfully. I should probably be suspicious of anything they do that actually follows the plan I laid out, but I'll take what I can get. At least they haven't managed to get themself arrested quite yet.

"City records show this is so," the judge conveys at last. That almost sounded (felt?) like reluctance, that time.

"Then do you rule that I must be a relative to the aforementioned prisoner?"

"It is so," says the judge briskly. Being a relative doesn't count for much in city laws, except when it comes to wills. Everything's built into specific relationships.

This is the bit where I have to hope they're looking for an excuse to get rid of us in the "out of the city" rather than "executed" sense.

"It is known," I say, "that all demons are made of an essential nature bound into their Forces. Is it so?"

"Relevance?"

"I'm attempting to prove a family relationship, your honor, which will affect the laws applicable to the prisoner's sentence.."

The judge is silent a moment, then inclines its head. "It is so."

Valentin is giggling, over on the bleachers. I think I'll just ignore them.

"It is known that all Lilim are made in the image of their mother, Lilith. Is it so?"

"It is so."

"It is known that their mother is female. Is it so?"

"It is so."

"Are all Lilim then female?"

"It is so."

"And are all Lilim related to each other?"

"It is so."

"Must the relative of a Lilim be female?"

It doesn't follow. It _doesn't_. But it almost follows, and the judge says, with something like impatience, "It is accepted." Not quite the same as _it is so_ , but close enough for legal purposes.

"My Forces," I say, "were bound together from the Forces of a Lilim, one to one and entirely, nine in all, at my creation. It is so. I enter this as evidence on my word as a citizen of this city. I swear that this is true. Will you accept this statement?"

The judge's fingers flex where they lay over its knees. That's almost like a reaction. I think it can tell where I'm going with this; I'd be a little disappointed in an ethereal made of rules-lawyering if it couldn't, by now. "Accepted."

"The aforementioned prisoner, as my relative, must then be female. And as I am a citizen, and male, that renders me the nearest male relative responsible for her behavior. She cannot be held responsible for her own behavior, being a mere woman, and her punishment is my concern." I smile almost too brightly. Backing that right down from Valefor into professional, right. "Is it so?"

The judge says nothing. I let the smile settle into place and wait, hands locked behind my back in--oh, I've been standing in parade rest all this time, haven't I? Well. Maybe they appreciate a little military posture around here. Rule of law and all that.

The temperature in this city is perfectly even, and I still think I would be sweating if I let myself. As my body's all imaginary here, I don't let myself. I'm projecting perfect confidence in my own argument, the way I used to project about the same emotion at classrooms full of bored children. Elohim, Habbalah, children, and Domain masters can all sense fear. Right?

"It is so," the judge declares. "You are liable for fines."

"Of course," I say.

"You should've asked first," Valentin shouts, and gets fined another five Essence before we can escape the court.


	15. In Which We Walk A Short Distance Without Incident

"Brilliant," Valentin says. "What do we need Essence for anyway? I've always loved traveling the wilds of the Marches without one to my name, knowing that neither Song nor luck will aid me against any hazards."

"This from the Impudite who was fined _eight Essence_ ," I say, because I do not want to admit that they have a point. And also because I'm making a good point myself. I smile nicely at the clerk in front of the prison. "We're here for the pickup. I believe the court sent word?" And then a bailiff to fend off the tiny group of spectators trying to badger us for commentary and some sort of autograph. Most of them still seem to be under the impression that Valentin wrote my speech, such as it was, and half of them want to congratulate the writer on such a novel approach, while the other half want to deliver scathing critiques of such an unprecedented divergence from traditional forms.

"Sign here," says the clerk. "And here. And here. And here. Full name, date, affiliation, signature. And sign here. Initials."

"There's no proper way to write out initials in Helltongue," Valentin says, "which has always struck me as a lack of foresight among those who developed it. The language isn't complex enough, and then they go hamper us with this writing system--"

"Later, Valentin," I say, and wonder of wonders, they shut up.

Well, no. They stop talking, and smile nicely at me, which is about as much obedience to what I said as anything Zhune ever did when I told him. I will deal with it _later_.

A pair of guards, identical to each other and similar as brothers to the clerk, march our Habbalite out of the prison to us. She's lost her orbiting sphere. As she's officially female, now, she can't be a citizen, and apparently the law-abiding spies at our heads were a sort of privilege of the position.

"And here," says the clerk. "And _here_ , and this is where your logographer signs, and then here..."

"Have you ever signed anyone out of the prison into the custody of her relatives before?" I ask, while I'm putting my name on far more documents than you'd think a society without real paper would be capable of producing. Never underestimate the ability of ethereals to deploy whatever happens to strike their fancy, and claim that it's thematic because they say so.

"I've been here a very long time," the clerk says. "I've seen all manner of things happen in this prison." Valentin gets a sidelong look from him. "Some of them more than once, and some not."

"And here's one more for the records." I smile very brightly, and take the Habbalite's hand the instant she's close enough for me to touch. "It's been lovely. We'll be on our way now. Have a marvelous day."

Delta follows us to the city walls, her hand in mine, docile as a metaphorical lamb. I imagine she's the type with sharper teeth and a more wolf-like tail beneath the fleece. While I never met Daosheng, you get a sort of impression of a missing person eventually if enough people are reacting to their absence, and the company is _built_ on reactions to the place where that dead Marquis is no longer standing. Daosheng was not the sort of person to hire meek and mild sorts, and I don't get the impression she'd offer a position if she didn't mean to follow through. So I can draw a few conclusions about the Habbalite playing nice at my side, even aside from her Band.

I wish the company weren't about to hire a Habbalite. But I'm not quite enough of an asshole to hope that Chaixin will disassemble her instead. Those are, I'm pretty sure, the two options ahead of her, and I don't know if she knows that. Valentin knows.

I wonder which one Valentin is hoping for. Or if they even care. They're not an indifferent sort of person, in general, but I can't tell with any accuracy yet what sorts of things they do care about. Only--things. Various ones.

"I'll miss this city," Valentin says meditatively, right when a gate guard is explaining the exit process to us. "One ought not leave a city without leaving something to a city, when it's the sort of city that's so easy to expand upon, don't you think?"

It's amazing how quickly I can get through a border crossing when I put my mind to it.


	16. In Which We All Learn Things We Wish We Hadn't

Delta's hand slips out of mine before we're three steps past the gate, and I'm glad to let her go. The walls are busy seaming themselves back together, as if there was never an entrance. From outside the sun isn't visible at all. The whole city might as well be nothing but blank walls, a blank concept. Sometimes I wonder if there's some metaphysical protection for ethereal domains to present a single concept as their exterior. As if it's more difficult to be redefined from the outside, or just reabsorbed into the Marches, if your shell is made of something iconic. You can fiddle with the details on 'a city in a somewhat Babylonian-Athenian style with laws written everywhere and tendency towards togas and god-sun ruling overhead' in a way you can't with giant walls, or an endless river.

One of these days I'll find out where Hell keeps all its books on how the ethereal realm works. The equivalent of physics textbooks for the land of dreams. And then, with my luck, I'll be irate and no better informed because they're all deep in the Archives or classified by the Game as restricted material.

"What took you so long?" Delta asks. Not me, but Valentin. Her image shifts to a sharper version of what she was before, with brighter eyes and longer fingernails. "I called and I called and no one answered!"

"Who did you call?" I ask.

"Daosheng. Itimad. _You_ , Valentin! You never answered once! I thought you all--" Her teeth snap together as if they're made of steel. In the celestial world, I suspect they are, and that those fingernails are significant as well. She curls her hands over her own arms as if she expects the ends of her fingers to be dangerous. "It's been... I don't know how long. Years."

"Ten years," Valentin says, helpful as ever. "Why didn't you try anyone else?" They are also being succinct, which seems like a bad sign.

"That's everyone I met," Delta says. "It's not as if phone calls count, for a Song like that." She bares her teeth at them, as if it's an unconscious gesture. "Were you in Trauma? Or did you just not care? Daosheng promised!"

"I don't remember your calls," Valentin says.

"That's not an answer!"

I contemplate the mountain near us. It looks no less sharp than before; I can make out smears of my own blood in places still. "Maybe we should figure out where we're going next, and do our shouting at each other while we're walking in a useful direction."

"I want to know why no one answered me." Delta has planted her feet in the sand as if that matters. In my experience, center of gravity and balance are very notional things in the Marches. "Before I'm going anywhere. Are you even still working for Daosheng?"

"Daosheng is dead," I say. It's a flat statement that's just _fact_ , and Valentin's expression doesn't change. "Chaixin got your note, which I gather you sent once you realized your Songs weren't getting through. Itimad is still alive, last I heard, but apparently non-functional. I've never met her myself, since I was hired afterward. And Valentin is--"

There is an awkward silence in the misty air.

"Valentin," I conclude, because they are refusing to do so for me, "is Valentin, but has been getting somewhat better about that lately."

"She can't be dead." The Habbalite is, if possible, more stationary than before. "She's a Marquis. She has power. She has _allies_. She has Chaixin!"

"Well," I say, "now Chaixin has a company and a lot of people are upset, and somehow we all manage. Except for those who don't. Do you want to come home with us, or what?"

"You're asking those questions that aren't questions," Valentin says to me, "and you have no idea the kind of bad habit that is."

"It's a valid question." Because if the Habbalite is going to run screaming into the night, it would be nice to have a little warning. "Do you want to come home?"

"It's not true," Delta says.

"Unless I got my information scrambled, you're not a Balseraph," I tell her, "so that's not going to help." I could feel sorry for her--a lot of things in life are harder if you're not a Balseraph--but it's not like it would do either of us any good, or get this job finished sooner. "If we could just work out which exit--"

"How did it happen?" Delta demands, turning to Valentin again.

They smile at her. "How did it happen?"

Well I don't think this is going anywhere good. And I think it's going to be finding that less than optimal place pretty fast, if I don't step in. Which is why I step quite literally between them. "Talking about tragedy _later_ , moving away from the city of rules lawyers _now_. Valentin, you're the Marches expert. So lay us out a route to the best exit."

"The Tower would be the fastest," Valentin says, "though there are a few complications on that route, such as people who are still alive." They add, after a moment, "Some of them would be, anyway. It hasn't been so very long, and we've all had so many different things to do. You should try it some time."

Delta shoots me a look, and I attempt to convey the most reassuring version of _Yes, they're usually like this, but it's really well in hand so don't worry about it_ back to her that can be expressed via an apologetic shrug.

"So," I say, "assuming that we would rather _not_ be devoured by angry former coworkers of yours--"

"Or yours?" Valentin asks.

"My former coworkers don't hang out in the Marches, by and large." Presumably the War has a presence somewhere around here, but it's not likely to be in the places populated by ethereals keeping well out of the war between celestial realms. (You would think that two celestial realms fighting each other could just get it all done on the celestial, but with one matter of Essence and another, that's not how it works.) I find that I am acquiring a fixed smile, much like the one I used to deploy at classrooms of small, suspicious children who knew I wasn't the regular teacher. "So _not_ the Tower! If nothing else, we could always hit the Oz Tether. I'm still on reasonable terms with the Seneschal."

That's a generous way of putting it. But even so.

"We'd have to cross the Vale," Valentin says. "Rather a lot of it, unless you want to take the slipstream back."

"I'd rather not, but there aren't a lot of handy ways to get someone out of the Marches if their vessel isn't still manifested down on the corporeal, they're not on good terms with Nightmares, and being returned to their Heart with Discord doesn't seem like a great plan." I turn to include Delta in this conversation. "And we could ditch this place easily if we didn't need to take you along, so by all means, give us a hint on whether or not you want to come with us."

"What happened to Daosheng?" Delta's expression is steady and her fingernails are cutting streams of blood into her arms. Very flashy, which seems right for a Habbalite. I hope they don't have any new employee orientation sessions they've been saving up until they had two people to go through the seminars at once.

"I don't know," I say, while Valentin says, "Technology killed her."

"It wasn't me," Delta says. "I always told her the truth. I was _loyal_. Technology--it couldn't, the Great Archangel _wouldn't_ , he wouldn't take out a Marquis of Theft, even I know that's too direct for their political positions--"

"Not him," Valentin says. "Or maybe it was. It was an accident. Didn't you hear? Or why did you run?"

"I ran because--something went wrong. I know there was trouble. I know someone tried to set a trap, but they'd never catch her in one. She's too smart and too fast and she wouldn't. You're lying to me, and I don't know why. You're probably not even the real Valentin."

"No one is fast enough or smart enough and she would and she did," Valentin says. They step in so close that I find myself backing up--I didn't quite mean to--with an Impudite at one shoulder and a Habbalite at the other, being somewhat forgotten myself between the two. "I am exactly who I am, even when I know things I didn't, and I can show you."

"You aren't--" is as far as Delta gets when Valentin grabs her by the throat.

"Valentin," I say, in my most reasonable voice for dealing with people who could pull me apart, "you _do_ remember what Chaixin said, don't you? Because I don't believe that you would forget that, even if you wanted to pretend otherwise, and I'm not going to be all 'Oh, Valentin totally forgot, not their fault' if we report back with a smaller Habbalite than we were sent to retrieve."

"I don't know how many Forces she has," Valentin says mildly, while Delta squirms in their grip, her form blurring and slipping about and failing to escape that single-handed hold by one centimeter. "We could count them up."

"And then what?"

"Bring back the number?" Valentin suggests, more tentatively than before. It's not a tone of voice they've employed often in my presence.

"Do you really think Chaixin would be satisfied by a number?"

"The map is not the territory," Valentin says, twisting the human-shaped blur of writhing smoke that Delta's turned herself into between their fingers, and never losing it, "though I've often found a well-drawn map is better to look at than the landscape it represents. There are beautiful topographical maps of very dull places. You should understand this, with your blueprints and wiring diagrams and those pictures you flip to the most often when you've opened your books."

"Setting aside for the moment the part where you're spending enough time investigating the contents of the books in my office to know which pages I stop at, which is something of an invasion of personal space even by Theft standards--" I stop, and try to reorganize my sentence. "Valentin. Stop."

"Why should I?"

"There are a lot of good answers to this question, but I think you're already perfectly aware of them." I pinch the bridge of my nose, and wish that I could've done this trip with--almost anyone else. _Adrian_ , for god's sake. Though likely we wouldn't be this far by now, because he would have spent the whole trip insisting on doing things his way, even when I had better plans. "If you fuck this up, I swear, I'm going to make that perfectly clear on the post-mortem."

"You are being tedious about this," Valentin says, "while I am attempting to have an honest dialogue with this creature about an event of some significance, about which she chooses to give evasive answers. We're not _Secrets_. We are allowed to answer questions directly."

There is a portion of me that's tempted to just let them keep going, and tell Chaixin exactly what I just said. I don't think anyone would doubt my version of events. How could I stop Valentin from doing anything they wanted to? And I don't like Habbalah. Not this one, not any.

But I would know the difference.

Fuck whatever gave me a sense of personal integrity, anyway. Maybe I can blame the Lilim I was made from.

"If you break her apart until Chaixin can't get any information out of her," I say, "the Marquis will _never_ forgive you. You can't take off a single Force. You might strip an ethereal one, and memories with it. And maybe some people in the company would expect that of you these days, but I know damn well you can act like someone functional if you care to exert yourself. And the Marquis must know the same, or she wouldn't have sent you on this job."

The Habbalite makes a strained, angry sound, which Valentin doesn't seem to have even heard.

"I don't remember the messages," they say.

"Presumably they arrived while you were distracted. They're beside the point. How should we get home?"

"The new link," Valentin says. "It'll cost. It's a bit of a secret."

"Link?" I put a hand on the Habbalite's shifting form, and extract her from Valentin's hands, as they no longer care to hold on. Delta is busy snarling vicious things in Helltongue, but they're not important. She can't do much about an Impudite like that.

"Our dear and wicked Prince made a link," Valentin says, and smiles beatifically at me. "There was a Heart on one side, and the Marches on the other, and you helped set it up. I suppose you don't spend enough time in the right kind of company to have heard the stories, and you should know better than to repeat any of it."

"Still not following, Valentin," I say.

"There's an artifact," Delta says, nearly spitting the words out, "that makes temporary Tethers, which they are _clearly_ talking about, and if you weren't stupid you would know that. Don't you know anything about artifacts?"

"Those," Valentin says. "Really, Leo, didn't you ever wonder what happened to Henry?"


	17. An Interlude, In Which Valentin Has Several Useful Thoughts, None Of Which They Care To Share With The Rest Of The Class

You are constructed of paper. Not _literally_ , that would be far too easy, a three-dimensional sculpture of elegant folds and slices with tantalizing hints of text laid along your cheekbones and disappearing beneath the cuffs of your shirt. The Marches can be tediously literal at times. Anyone can be a sunny day or the scent of autumn caught in the middle of a busy marketplace. You are not just anybody, you are a quite complicated and well-made Impudite of Theft nee Nightmares who happens to possess a distressing compositional nature today.

The purpose of the literal version would be to send other people spinning about after those words. Instead you feel that you are made of a mass of files, scattered across the floor, and you are trying to scrabble them all up together as quickly as possible (like some sad little damned soul, sentenced for mortal sin to a damnation of eternal filing) to put them back in order. You are certainly not in order. Quite likely several of the files have slipped through cracks in the floor, and can no longer be retrieved, such that previous order can never be completely restored.

Many things are lost forever. You ought to be used to this by now. It is entirely unreasonable for you to be fussed by this, any more than the winds of Stygia give you cause for concern, some number of decades after you first encountered them. They are simply a fact of life. One buttons the coat up higher and strides briskly on.

You would like to be rather more like that hypothetical stalwart person than you currently are.

The children are arguing, at your side and at your back, an endless squabble that's built on distrust. They are repeating their arguments in new colors, but no one is particularly fooled by seeing last year's fashion done up in new fabric. "It was true last time," you tell the Habbalite, "and it will be true next time, and the time after that, no matter how often you deny it."

"It's not," she says. She is tedious in the nature of her denials. You were bored of that sort of denial even before it swallowed Itimad and shoved Adrian through a wall into a box he could walk right out of, any day at all, if he only cared to.

"Don't you trust me?" you ask the Habbalite.

"Of course," she says.

"Valentin," says the Calabite, "really."

You slip an arm over his shoulders to see if he will let you, and find that he has stopped shying away from you entirely. It won't last, not with one thing and another and a third and the inevitable, but you turn your wrist just so, lace against his cheek, and say, "Aren't you enjoying the scenery?"

"It's more rustic than my tastes lean toward," he says. "When we get to the bridge--"

"You'll like it, Leo. It's full of cut stone piled up deliberately, and none of these briars." The briars in question are woefully inert, as if they have nothing to do with passersby. Perhaps they don't. There are parts of the Marches that are nothing but husks of their former selves. The landlord has been gutted, and no one pays the electric bill anymore. The perils of being imaginary, really. There's so little difference between people and landscape that a person can die here and leave all their friends a little unclear on whether anything of much importance happened at all.

At some point, you should tell these two that you're being followed. But why ruin a stroll?


	18. In Which Valentin Shares Many Things With The Rest Of The Class

"We're being followed," Valentin says, at the worst possible moment. We're somewhere in a wild tangle of pseudo-jungle with thorny vines trying actively to devour our obligatory Habbalite, and do you know how good she is at not being devoured by aggressive dream-vines? Not very, that's how good. So thanks to my coworker's distracting comments, I get a thorny vine to the throat.

"Thanks," I say. Well. I imagine the words written out in the air overhead, since this marauding domain we've wandered into believes that I can't speak while there are vines wrapped around my throat, and I don't care to fight the domain master on that point. Just these vines. Thanks. That'll be plenty. "Care to tell us by what? Or help over here?"

"It's been going on for a while," Valentin says, idly setting a portion of the vines on fire with flames arcing out of their hands. I swear they choose fiery methods just to fuck with my head. "I couldn't be very precise about how long, what with one reason and another, though we could blame it on the domain's handling of time, don't you think? You can blame anything you like on a domain if no one looks too closely and you make your best sincere face during the passing of the blame."

Delta makes an angry noise, possibly because there are vines wrapped around her, too.

I am tired of vines. I think of little wisps of things, mere notions, that fade out of existence as fast as they're made, until I've had a good six or seven seconds of uncomfortable (but not actually very damaging strangling) and picked out the relevant limits of what this domain considers acceptable. It doesn't like invisible effects much, unless they seem natural.

And so I dream up a slick coating of tractionless slime for Delta, and she splats right out of the vines' grip like a squeezed grape. An angry, dripping grape who hisses my way, with no particular sign of gratitude, before scrambling towards higher ground.

Not a hint of gratitude, even when I take the coating right back off her. It's a fine line between adjusting another person's image, and just...setting something right around them, not part of their image, but between them and their attacker. Makes it easier for me to remove than for her to affect, too, so she should put a little thought into the fact that I didn't leave her dripping while untangling myself from the vines. Which are increasingly less confident about their attack, anyway, as Valentin bears in with their flamethrower hands.

I apply a layer of herbicide to my hands, and the vine uncoils at last from my throat when I tug. "Thanks, but no thanks," I say, as the flames lick closer. "Think I have this one. What's following us? Because if it's those briar panthers again, someone should tell them by the fourth iteration, it's not a _surprise_ attack anymore."

The flames vanish from Valentin's hands. They idly shred the vines, thorns withering away from where their hands land, even as that assailant is trying to flee. I'm never sure if those gestures are pointed, or just habitual, with that Impudite. Probably the latter by way of the former, if I had to make an educated guess.

"How do you feel about Agent Orange?" Valentin asks.

"I would say it's not my favorite agent."

"No, you preferred Bond," Valentin says, and slips an arm around my waist, nestling in closer than I like while Delta sulks at us from the top of the ravine we've been working through. I would object to what they said pointedly if I weren't trying to get this question answered. "You might not like it much up there," they call to Delta, who shows no inclination to listen. "She has rifles."

"Who?" I ask.

"An old friend," Valentin says.

"Quantify 'old', here."

Valentin smiles winningly, which is a sort of warning sign akin to a fire alarm going off, and lets go of me to spin around and cup their hands to their mouth. "Hey, Qamar," they shout, "how long has it been since we met?"

Delta's knee explodes in exactly the splat of blood and bone you'd expect when a rifle's bullet hits that joint.

I scramble halfway up the side of the ravine to pull her down, while Valentin notes conversationally, "I've never been the sort to say 'I told you so' when I could simply point out that I'm not the sort to say it, instead." 

Delta's bleeding and wide-eyed, but damn quiet. Probably a lot closer to something nasty happening than she was expecting to happen that fast. She slings an arm around my shoulder, and for all that she's a Habbalite, I'd rather have her touching me than Valentin, right now. I get her to the ravine floor, and say, "We're heading out."

"Into clear terrain, against a sniper?" Valentin asks, with a brief expression of feigned surprise.

"Versus having her standing above us shooting down," I say, dragging Delta along as fast as she can go, "yes, because in clear terrain we can _see her_. Fix your leg, Habbie. This domain won't let you walk right until you do."

"Can't," she snaps, with the particular wrath Habbalah spare for accidental demonstrations of their own weakness.

"Valentin--"

"I didn't think we left on such bad terms," they muse, strolling down the ravine beside us. Vines are slithering out of our way as we move, which I do not attribute to fear of _me_. "Perhaps I should have left a note, one fastened with an appropriately colored ribbon to a shard of my Heart, but that seemed far too sentimental, and I was a touch busy at the time. Places to go, people to betray. You would think she would understand, wouldn't you?"

"Valentin," I say, with the sort of perfect calm that at least Nik and Fer would've recognized for what it was, "I don't give a fuck how you left your ex, and whether or not she has a reason to shoot at us. Storytime later. Fix Delta's leg."

"You could do so much more if you only applied yourself, Leo," they say, and don't even glance at Delta. But her leg seals up, knee functioning properly and even the blood vanishing.

Her outfit has also acquired more lace, and lines of pearl buttons. We can let that pass without comment.

The thorn-vines are intractable, being some sort of animated figment, and each one semi-independent, just to make it harder to dream them into compliance. I inform the landscape instead that in this jungle the air is thick with obscuring fog, the trees stretch branches and moss-hung vines across every bit of clear space over the ravine, and the ravine itself has a twistier path than anyone previously realized. The landscape mostly complies. A host of angry monkeys take up in the branches above us, shrieking and flinging themselves around to shake vines in a distracting manner.

Valentin looks at me thoughtfully. "How much time did you spend dodging enemies in the Marches, the last time you were here?"

"Somewhat less time than I've spent trying to set up lines of sight with a sniper rifle on the corporeal." I'm trying to convince the fog that it muffles voices in particular, or just the sounds we're making, but it's not convinced. It'd happily muffle all sound in general, and I finally let it run with that. The specification works against its nature more than I am willing to put a lot of effort into forcing right now. Try hard enough to change something in a way it doesn't mean to be changed, and it'll snap back, and lock you out entirely for a while. I want to keep my options open more than I want that specific effect.

"We should go on vacation here," Valentin says, "and I can show you all the places where what you mean to do will work, and then the places where what you never imagined was possible springs to mind and makes itself true while you wait."

"If we don't die," Delta snaps, "before anyone gets vacation." She doesn't need dragging anymore, but she's not trying to take point on this scramble through the ravine, either. I don't actually mind taking the lead: the ground clears up exactly as I want it, and the thorn-vines know enough by now to scramble out of my way and not make attempts. Good to see that the lines of communication are open enough for that, in this domain.

"We might," Valentin says, not sounding particularly worried about the possibility.

"What happens if you die in the Marches?" Delta asks. She asks me, having mostly given up on conversation with Valentin, which is a sign of intelligence right there.

I clear a boulder from our path by giving it a pebble's size. It'd be nice to know if anyone is still following us, but Valentin's not offering information. No more shots may be a good sign. Or might not be. "You came here without knowing?"

"I knew what would happen if I stayed," Delta says.

Rain begins to fall, heavy drops splashing down all around us. I don't like the change when it's not one I made. A sniper has no reason to obscure her own vision further, and--

Fuck.

"Out of the ravine," I say, yanking Delta towards the side, and I give us steps up, shoving the uncooperative rock into the shape I want through force of will against its natural inertia, while Delta staggers along behind me. If this domain weren't so picky about gravity I'd toss us into the air; the ravine's been getting deeper as we moved through, and I was so focused on a clear path ahead and obscured sight-lines overhead that I didn't _notice_ , like some sort of amateur. You'd think no one had ever tried to kill me before.

"Oh," Valentin says, "that's rather clever." They're not talking about me. They spring over Delta, who I'm trying to shove up the stairs faster than she can climb, and then they reach around her to grab _my_ wrist. "I haven't had this much fun in years," they say, in perfect sincerity, just before the roaring wall of water catches up and hits us.

You don't need to breathe in the Marches. But sometimes a domain believes you do.

We're a terrible little chain, Valentin's hand locked around my wrist and me gripping Delta by the collar of her coat, because I already lost track of her hand and I hope the weight in that coat is her and not some nastier trick our hunter has come up with already. The water engulfs us as slams us against walls, drags us through thorns, while I try to convince a flash flood that's so very comfortable in its natural habitat that it could have a pocket of air inside big enough for me to catch my breath.

The flash flood declines to offer one. It doesn't believe me. The demon who made this (because if angels were hunting us, I don't think this would be their style) has a will at least as strong as mine, and the acquiescence of the domain on top of that. Ravines in the jungle love flash floods, and flash floods in a hungry jungle love to devour living things in front of them. The monkey troop is a pack of limp little bodies slapping against us with wet fur when we're not being thrown into the rocks.

Valentin says something. I can't hear them. I only know they spoke because there was, for an instant, the sensation of them having done so a moment before. A trick of the Marches or of the domain or of what they can do, as a half-cracked demon who still has centuries of experience in this place--I don't know. The domain wants me to take a breath in this swirl of water where I can't even tell which way is up or down anymore, and nothing good will happen if I give in.

We hit rock, underwater.

Hit it, and go _through_ , not the rock parting for us but my own image gone insubstantial, and Valentin makes a soothing kind of sound and pats my hand. 

_It's not two-dimensional, Leo,_ say the words that aren't even auditory. I know that trick. _Strictly speaking, it's not three-dimensional, either, as it can be larger or smaller on the inside than the out, but as this one's a very standard type, downright boring, someone ought to have a word with the dreamling in charge that thinks it's so clever to emulate the corporeal without a clear understanding of its limitations--_

"--and tell it," Valentin says, looking entirely dry and tidy where they stand on the gray sand, while I'm gasping for breath and Delta is huddled in a wet patch of misery on the ground, "that the topsoil is very thin that kind of environment." They pat me on the head, and then fiddle with the buttons of their coat's cuffs. "Really, I expect better from a domain of that age. They don't make ethereals like they used to."

I can't see anything but sand around us. No sign of the domain we were in, above us or nearby, and I'd like to say that's just as well, but we left an enemy in there. "Who's following us, Valentin?"

"Qamar," they say. "I used to work with her. She was a delight at parties; always sulking in the corner as if she didn't enjoy the process, when she'd had a hand in planning what we did to the guests we disliked the most." Valentin shrugs loosely. "If she catches us, she'll call the Princess on us. We ought to keep moving."

That was unnervingly coherent of them.

Delta spits up water, still huddled on the sand. She's dripping and the sand around her is dry. So go the Marches. "We're all going to die," she says hoarsely. "Why didn't Chaixin send someone better?"

"All the better people are dead," Valentin says. "Only the demons and the damaged are left." They offer me a smile and their arm, as if we're about to enter a ballroom. "Shall we?"


	19. In Which There Are Cutting Remarks

In the heat of the moment, letting Valentin lead seemed like a good idea. They have far more Marches experience than I do, as well as experience with the old friend trying to shoot us. It made sense.

I have made better decisions in my life.

They chose the ruins of a domain for our escape route, and while the principle is sound--no central power to oppose us, better options for concealment than the fog and sand of the undecorated Marches proper--we were three blocks into the place before they mentioned casually that this domain was abandoned because some ethereal war centuries ago left it poisoned.

And by poisoned, they mean that every ten or twenty minutes, the whole place shakes, and an acid wind howls down the streets. Very Stygia, except that the wind in Stygia only cuts metaphorically, and this one's chewing at our minds.

"It doesn't look centuries old," I tell Valentin, who strolls down the center of the street as if we aren't walking through a post-apocalyptic dreamscape. The ordinary wind catches at their coat and hair for dramatic fluttering that's so very--Impudite. If only I could've gone to the Marches with Lanthano.

I mean, we might've been shot hours ago, but it would've been more fun up to that point.

"Because there are apartment buildings?" Valentin asks, with a nod to one of those to our right. "Even the Romans had those."

"I know my architectural history, thanks. I mean that they're clearly using modern steel and that's classic brutalist style."

"Is it." Valentin tilts their head to the side, pausing in the center of a dirty median strip to look over the chunky outline of the ugliest skyscraper I have ever laid eyes on. "How can you tell through all the concrete?"

"Don't stop. It's just a comment." Except that I have to stop and walk back half a block to grab Delta, who's leaning against a wall. Her hands are shaking. "Keep up. You _know_ we're being followed."

"I can't think straight," she says. "So I can't _walk_ straight. Get out of my face. You don't even care--"

"About getting the job done? I actually do." I want to shake her. It wouldn't help. At this point, I could very well shake her right out of coherence, and I'm not actually sure what happens to a Renegade, if they suffer mind-death in the Marches. Limbo? It's not like they can be kicked back home with no Heart to guide them. Whatever the answer is, it probably doesn't help me drag her back to the Marquis, as requested. "Shift your image to something portable, and I'll just carry you."

"Like what?" She pushes off the wall, and starts to trudge forward again. So slow, when I'd rather run right out of this domain; it's all I can do not to grab her and just _pull_. "Every time I start to think of anything this place hits me again. It burns right through my mind."

"I don't particularly care. Turn into a parakeet. Anything but a shoulder dragon."

"Why not a dragon?"

"Did you do _any_ research before coming here?"

"I was running away," Delta says, one foot dragged in front of another, as we catch up to where Valentin has been waiting for us. "I didn't have time."

If I were being strictly fair, I would tell her that I didn't do much research on the Marches when I ran away to them either. Just enough to ask for help up a Tether, and find a decent place to hunker down. And I had an ethereal guide, on top of that, to keep me from making dumb mistakes.

The ground is shaking. I don't feel particularly generous right now.

Valentin loops an arm through mine. "When I suggested this route, I had a brisker walking pace in mind," they say, all coherent amiability that I don't trust. "We could simply bundle her up in a pack and run for the exit, but as running draws attention and the wind will be here any moment, it wouldn't actually help."

Newspapers blow down the street, each of them emblazoned with some giant headline that's probably plot-significant to the dream this came from, or the concept the ethereals who built the place were dependent on. The wind is turning cold and sharp, and in a moment it'll taste like acid. That's when it starts cutting through mind proper and not only images. Valentin _still_ looks elegantly windswept, and Delta is falling behind as we walk.

"What would actually help, Valentin?" I take my arm out of theirs, and walk faster. The streets crack in front of us, but it's all cosmetic. The wind is the only part of this scenario that matters, and everything else is paper-thin illusion. Remnants and ruins from when people used to build things here. I've been through domains that are constructed to look in disrepair, and that's _different_. An aesthetic choice, where this is actual failure. "Do you have something constructive to offer?" The air tastes like fire did, back when I could walk through it without being hurt. "Because if you have a clever solution that gets us home before anyone gets shot, I'd love to hear it."

They keep pace with me easily. They could probably outrun me, and sit smugly on top of one of those broken skyscrapers ahead to shout useless advice down while I was still on the street, if they felt like it. "We could leave her behind," they say, with a sunny smile for my glance backward to where Delta is trudging grimly behind us. "She can't hear us unless I let her, poor thing, with her mind as tattered as it's become."

"The tests work better when Zabina gives them." The wind doesn't even roar past us: it's silent and searing, and it leaves the street paper-covered and the rest of us weary. Except for Valentin, who never looks tired at all.

"Did you think that was a trick question?" They keep smiling at me, sidelong and with eyelashes lowered. "We found her, and she doesn't know anything. She would've told us whatever she had, if she had it, and now she's pretending to know more so that we'll save her. We can feed her to Qamar and go see the better parts of the Marches, where--"

"We're going home, Valentin. And we're taking her with us."

"You can be remarkably tedious, Leo."

"And if the Marquis asks me to entertain you, I'll consider that a relevant critique of my job performance."

"How delightfully corporate of you."

"Adding in more adverbs doesn't make your critique more relevant. In case you were wondering."

"I was wrong," Valentin says, slinging an arm over my shoulder, " _you_ are delightful. Do you want to explore this example of whatever sort of architecture it is and say cutting things about the lighting choices?" They drag me sideways into a doorway even as they ask, which is a pretty good indication of how seriously most of their questions are meant. Especially the ones asking for permission.

"This is a bad time for flirting," I say, "what with an enemy on our heels."

"Yes," Valentin says, "and she stole our Habbalite when you weren't looking, so we ought to get under better cover while we have the chance. How do you feel about mysterious underground tunnels?"


	20. An Interlude, In Which Old Friends Chat

Qamar held up her fist. The demon inside buzzed against her fingers. She could have crushed it with the slightest thought; it was a little more effort to remember to only hold it, and leave it alive a few moments longer. "Is this yours?"

"More's the pity," Valentin said. They sat on the edge of a roof, legs crossed, their coat fluttering about behind them. The soles of their boots were as pearly white as the actual pearl buttons on each sleeve. "Would you toss it this way?"

She turned her fist about in the air, and cracked her fingers wide enough to see the fluttering of wings and scrabbling legs inside. "No," Qamar said, "I feel you ought to come down here and take it from me."

"Always with the 'ought' and 'should' and 'necessary'." Valentin folded their hands over one knee. "Why don't you come up here and talk about it?"

Qamar set her shoulders against the reassuring concrete of the doorway around her. It was a lie, as was everything in the Marches. The trick was to be a better liar than the salvaged texts of the dead. "Where's your latest minion?"

"Oh, somewhere about," Valentin said airily, and did not so much wave a hand as wiggle their fingers off in a direction that was surely not the right one. Unless it was, and they had indicated that direction to convince her to discount threats from that point. She knew all their old tricks, and had taught them several personally. "Where's yours?"

"What minion of mine would that be?"

"Whichever one you have with you," they said, all false cheer and patience. "We aren't either of us foolish enough to travel these places alone."

"If I wait long enough," Qamar said, "the domain will whittle you down, with not a hand laid on you."

"But you wouldn't enjoy that," Valentin said. They leaned forward over their knee, so far that in a place pretending strictly to gravity, they would have plummeted down to the pavement. "You were always about the hands and teeth and claws and tongue, and occasionally the thighs, so what would you get out of this without a hand laid on me?"

"Satisfaction," Qamar said, and wondered where Firuze had gone. She had set the Balseraph a task the moment Valentin fled the streets for cover, and had--not trusted it, exactly, but been under the reasonable impression that it would comply.

"Nonsense," Valentin said, with that irritating delight they acquired whenever they thought they'd won an argument, "you would be utterly unsatisfied. Flinging me back to my Heart, when this place can only damage my mind? You might as well throw me a goodbye party, and bring in my favorite cake to set beneath the banners."

"You're simply attempting to lure me out and distract me," Qamar said.

"Nonsense. I do nothing simply."

"I suppose not. Look at what you're wearing."

"Some of us aren't slaves to chronism," Valentin said, and sprang to their feet. For an instant she thought they would dive down on her. But they only stood at the edge of the roof, and made good use of having acquired a cape. The Impudite was, as with all their Band, a ridiculous and vain creature, and she still knew better than to underestimate this one. "You've done lovely things with shadows and concealing sound, you really have, and I wouldn't want you to feel that I haven't noticed, or appreciated, the effort you've put into this."

Qamar held up the insect between her thumb and forefinger. She would've allowed herself claws, except then she never would have kept the creature alive. "Shall I crush it?"

"I wish you would," Valentin said. "That would improve this situation immensely."

"And yet you brought it all this way."

"Really," Valentin said, "as a favor. It's not as if I have _your_ minion at hand to offer in exchange, and we both know that any purported exchange would only be an excuse for some delightful bit of mutual betrayal, so why not render the situation as uncomplicated as you'd prefer? I could hardly stop you, from here."

"No," she said, "you couldn't," and crushed the insect in her hand.


	21. In Which I Explain Reality To People

Things I expected in the warren of crumbling tunnels beneath the city included hazardous terrain, pervasive odors, and--maybe I should be proud about predicting this one--severed power cords throwing off hazardous sparks at irregular points. Not on the list: a demon hiding as a color.

It's a clever trick, actually. I was impressed in the middle of that brawl, because how often do you get to fight a color, even in the Marches? The image was quite clearly the color itself, and not a shape that _was_ the color, though it's a fine distinction to make while you're trying to rip someone's Forces off.

That's what it was doing. Smug little thing, expecting that I was all mind and no soul, to try that line of attack. I had a little pity on it, and tore its mind to shreds with resonance and an imaginary knife. There's no reason to rip parts of someone's soul off them just because you _can_. It was doing its job, I was doing mine, and I wasn't about to take the attempt to eat me personally.

Especially when it was so bad at finishing the job.

I hauled myself up an empty elevator shaft the old-fashioned way, via muscle and careful footing. The domain was sufficiently enamored of corporeal physics that it felt exactly like climbing an elevator shaft in my vessel would have, except that even with some chewing on my mind, I was stronger and faster the whole way up. Much as I love the corporeal, the Marches keep reminding me that I'm so much tougher here than I am there. It's all the world of the mind.

But if I had lived eternally in the world of the mind, would I have learned how to jam my fingertips into that kind of crevice, and brace myself just so, to climb up this way? Probably not. I would've just learned to imagine stairs for myself, or fight the gravity with force of will.

Hard to say what the better route is. But I know I like having a little versatility to work with. It keeps people on their toes.

I climb six stories in the apartment building. It doesn't have much character on the inside. Oh, the tattered posters on the wall of the apartment and the corroding furniture give it some atmosphere, but the same chair has repeated in every apartment I glanced into while picking one with the best view on the demon downstairs. She knows lines of sight as well as I do, and is dressed for shadows, on top of that.

I imagine a sniper rifle, and set it aside. Some things she's certainly ready for. And no matter how creative I get or detailed with my imagination, all my weapons only hit as hard as my mind does. It's not like the corporeal, where a child can murder someone with a pistol, and no one can do much with a sheet of paper. (Malakim of fucking Creation aside.) Here a weapon is just a focusing device.

If I hit her, she can find me. And Valentin doesn't think we can take her in a simple brawl. They're probably right. We're the ones who've been chewed on by a half dozen things on our walk this far, and apparently she's just been strolling along in our wake past the bodies of our enemies.

When Valentin even leaves bodies.

I sit on my heels, watching the doorway she's in. Can't see her particularly well except for when she raises that fist; the angle's just not going to be good from any of these windows. So I start adjusting things around me. Just a bit. It's easier conceived of than imagined precisely, but I turn the window into a magnifying lens. That's how I discover Valentin's old friend has a twitching bottlefly inside her hand, and...fuck it all, that's going to be Delta.

I _told_ her she should let me carry her.

If she'd been a parakeet on my shoulder when that demon pounced, what would've happened to me?

What if scenarios are based played out at a safe distance, in both time and space. I consider that fly, and its position. What you can see you can affect, in the Marches--better said, what you can _sense_ you can affect--if you have the will for it, but what am I going to give her? A steel carapace, but I suspect this demon could punch right through it. Or imagine it away in turn. We're all quite good with our imaginations here.

Let's try to imagine a plan that gets Delta out of there before she's squashed, or before this demon decides to shoot Valentin outright. Or, worse yet, call in a Princess. I'm not sure waking up back to our vessels helps, if a Superior arrives.

Generally nothing helps when a Superior arrives. That's why we don't try to get their attention at every little hiccup. A Servitor who can't go a few weeks without calling on the Boss is clearly not a Servitor who ought to have a job, or possibly an existence. But Valentin might be exciting enough bait to take this demon right past focus and into calling for reinforcements.

I would say that it's flattering that Valentin trusts me to handle this part myself, but I don't know that they do. They might not even remember I'm with them. I suppose I'll find out that part when we meet up again, assuming we do.

The fist turns, and she's pinching Delta-the-fly between finger and thumb. There's a squashing threat if I've ever seen one. I pat the sniper rifle like it's some kind of reassurance, and attempt to do...too many things at once, really.

Right, Delta. You can't imagine much for yourself, being a surprisingly narrow-minded type for a Techie. Ex-Techie. So let me tell you a story where your fly-image is surrounded by a thin shell, exactly like the image itself. A little crunchy shell, and you're the caramel in the center. Squishy. Then shrinking down, leaving the shell behind, into a smaller and smaller concept, downright microscopic, which tumbles out through an eye, between those fingers, and is caught away by the wind.

You don't even have to make this happen. All you need to do is not fight when I tell you what you look like and how you feel and the exact dimensions of your own body.

I wonder if being a Superior is like being in the Marches all the time.

The window-lens swells and magnifies more and more, tilts--that's a hazard, someone could notice that, but I'm trying to track the speck that's Delta while it drifts down to the ground. She's a speck in the pavement, now. You'd need a magnifying glass and a needle to do her any harm.

The demon in the doorway moves forward, and I drop to the ground. Tell the window it looks like every other window, exactly.

Something explodes, outside, and I don't even go to look. It's time for _me_ to get back downstairs, and away, and hope that Delta can hold out against a little more wind, because I'm not going to pick her up until Valentin's cleared this demon out of the area.

Someone is shouting, outside. It's not Valentin. I honestly don't know if that's a good sign or not.


	22. An Interlude, In Which I Am Surprised

You missed several opportunities to say witty things to Leo about running and his penchant for speed because you, in fact, were the one running, while he continued to pursue the exact terms of the mission assigned to him by Chaixin. If he had been running at your side, you might have explained to him both his own predilection (and what it meant to various people in the company), and why the spirit of the law was more important than the letter, and the ways in which Daosheng had embodied that spirit of the law: but the tedious reality, insofar as anything in the Marches had what could be called "reality" (though a great many things there, and more than some people might have admitted to, could achieve some tedium), was that you were too busy running for your life.

It wasn't ironic. You are trying to find the exact word, and how to translate it between three languages, because he still doesn't know any sort of Chinese well enough to appreciate linguistic precision there, when you catch up with him.

You walk up beside him, and find he notices you within a few steps.

"I saved the Habbalite," he says.

"Did I ask?"

"You should have," he says. There's a pen hooked into his shirt pocket that you suspect you could Charm, if you really cared to. "I'm surprised you even came to find me. I gave up waiting hours ago."

"Imagine how disappointed Chaixin would be if you didn't bring me back," you say, and slip an arm around his waist. You get a frown from him, as if that means anything when he doesn't twitch away, and offer him one of your least sincere smiles. Just to see if he can tell the difference. "You didn't! There's no image of her anywhere around us."

"Making figments that look like real people is creepy," he says. "You must do it all the time."

"How did you mean to get home without me? Really, Leo, you can't keep walking in one direction in the Marches and hope that it takes you to a secret Theft bridge between the Ethereal and Celestial realms of existence."

His eyes narrow. It's adorable. You'll have to fling him at Adrian a bit harder, and see what happens. "Do you know--"

"Often," you say. "This is the most fun I've had since Daosheng died." You switch your smile to one of the really sincere ones before he can notice anything, and lean in to whisper in his ear, "You'll like this one. You just can't tell anyone about it."

"How do _you_ know about it, if it's a Theft secret, and not Nightmares?"

You can't remember how you learned about it. This doesn't even bother you anymore. Portions of your mind simply aren't in the right place, and you simply have to live with it. Or perhaps you will live with it in a complicated manner. No one with buttons like yours does much _simply_. You make up a delightful sort of lie to answer his question, and tell the story so well he even believes it.


	23. In Which We Cross That Bridge When We Come To It

I spend about ten seconds telling myself that it's a complete coincidence that Valentin has led us to a domain that looks very much like a patch of the Marches I once helped build. Then we walk into the center plaza, and that fountain is still there. A stone statue of a pretty young woman, pouring an endless stream of coins from her hands into the basin below.

She still looks like Luna, who I haven't seen--who I haven't _thought_ about in some time. Quite deliberately. I wonder if Valefor--

Well, he probably knows, because of what I told him, and he didn't care, is why he left it that way. I'm not about to change the details now. There isn't much to this place but the one plaza and the buildings around it, but it's a place. A solid kind of place. I did the architecture myself, a little Florence and a little Venice, and Zhune made most of the figments, so the crowd around us is appropriately Stygian. Cutthroats and pickpockets and kidnappers, all preying on each other in turn. It's a good thing the Marches doesn't need a real economy. No one in this tiny imaginary world _produces_ anything.

Maybe the forgers. I should remember to add a few of those, while we're here.

"I didn't know we were so into recycling," I say, because Valentin clearly expects a comment. Their expression is rather like the one Lanthano's cat wears when it's just leapt onto his lap and expects to be congratulated for the act. "As a Word."

"This would be a hard one to fence," Valentin says, "so why not keep it?"

Somehow I don't think that explaining the whole place reminds me of events I'd rather have forgotten isn't a good answer for that why not, nor is that explanation one I intend to give to Valentin. They know more than I'd like about my background as it is. "How practical," I say. "How does this work?"

"You ask that as if you expect me to give you straight answers," Valentin says. I am largely immune to their smiles, and that never stops them from deploying more. Impudites all have such pretty hair and elegant poses; I think they'd give up using them, whether effective or not, about as quickly as I'd give up my own resonance. "Shall I?"

"Can you?"

Valentin takes that excuse to lean in and whisper in my ear. "It's very easy. Look for the man with the inaccurate hat."

That ought to make no sense at all. But in the crowd of criminals preying on each other with varying degrees of plausibility--a figure near us is being shivved every time they turn around, to no permanent effect--there is one man dressed in not even Hollywood-plausible levels of period appropriate clothing. He wears an elegant black top hat, and he looks almost the same as the last time I saw him.

I suppose if you have an Impudite with no Corporeal Forces left attached sitting around doing nothing but watching Tether endpoints, you might as well assign him to one in the Marches.

Except this isn't a Tether. I've heard of artifacts or Songs that make temporary Tethers, but in the way you hear about ethereal gods showing up on the corporeal and mucking around. It certainly _happens_ , but you don't run into a lot of credible witnesses to the actual event.

"Henry," Valentin says, "you're looking well." They smile as winningly as they ever have at me, and yet that sounded remarkably like a threat.

It's easy to forget that the whole mess that has the company angry at Zhune, decades later, involved Henry, too.

Henry taps the brim of his hat, and barely glances at me. I doubt he's recognized me in this form; my image looks a little akin to my celestial one, but it's a long way from identical, and I've only met him a few times anyway. It feels like I should be holding a grudge myself; he abandoned me in Shal-Mari after dragging me through the wrong gate, and that's only what I _know_ he's done against me.

Can't find it in me. There's a strange cast to his eyes that's not just an odd image choice. Like something snapped in his head--differently than the way Valentin has snapped, I'd say--and the jagged edges show through his pupils when they twist the right way. So he didn't help me when I was trying to find Zhune. So what? He's a demon. I don't expect better.

It's not like he was a coworker. Just a Wordmate. You can't expect any sort of loyalty from other Magpies, though you can hope that they won't betray you outright to your enemies without a really pressing cause.

I let the silence between the two of them stretch out for a few more seconds. There are interesting sights to take in while they have their stare-down, and a few statues in need of adjusting so that they come off better from multiple angles. I thought all the Balseraph saints in the high niches were a nice touch, myself.

"So," I say. "About that bridge."

Henry is still staring at Valentin. There's one smile between the two of them, and I'd guess about two sets of longing for murder. "Everything has a price," he says.

"Yes, or what would Theft be good for? It's hard to get mileage out of stealing things people don't value." I take the pen that's Delta out of my pocket. "That said, do you have a price sheet available?"

"One Essence per Force," Henry says, "for a maximum on how many you can pass through at a time, and then one for each passage. I do hope you're well-supplied, or you may have some difficulty squeezing through." He doesn't so much smile at Valentin as bare his teeth. "You could try passing through a bridge of lower capacity. We could all enjoy the show."

"Can you hold fourteen now?" Valentin asks. "How exciting that must be for you. Where would you _put_ all those Forces?"

Henry's teeth are jagged. I'm not sure they were a moment before. "I don't--" He hiccups to a stop, and then says, as if he's reciting and not pleased to do so, "My capacities have been usefully expanded for the purposes of this role, thanks to our Lord."

"What did the Boss do to you?" It's not a question I should ask. But there it is.

"Whatever was necessary," Valentin says, sounding so amused I am reminded to dislike them all over again. "He's so much more useful like this than he was back in Stygia, lurking in alleyways and pretending to useful employment. There's no need to look at me like that; I'm not the one who decided that a spare Impudite might serve a higher purpose as part of an artifact than as his own damaged self."

"More to the point," I say, "we don't really have seventeen Essence on hand, unless you've been performing secret Rites when I wasn't looking."

"Alas, nothing of the sort. If only the Boss would accept the theft of imaginary money as sufficient to the cause."

"We would have to find imaginary people who cared." I count up what's available, and nudge Delta back into a more communicative shape. Parakeet it is. I gave her a tidy image with neat blue feathers, but she immediately puffs up into a ball of miserable feather-fluff and stuffs her head under a wing. "What kind of Essence do you have left?" I don't get an answer. "We're trying to send you home, here. With a proper pick-up back in Stygia."

It takes a few minutes of coaxing and some counting between us--Valentin loses track of how much they have, twice, which remains disconcerting--before we work out that we're holding ten Essence between the three of us. Henry stands there nearby, jaw locked, as if... I don't know. As if he's not allowed to interfere with this part. He can snipe about personal matters, but come time to do his job, there's a compulsion on him that won't let him shirk.

And I thought the worst thing a Prince was likely to do to a malfunctioning Servitor was disassemble them, and make them into someone new. (There are things that are worse in the moment than not existing, of course. But I still rated them as higher overall, because there's that faint chance of recovery if you appear useful again.) Learn something new every day.

"Right," I say. "Neither of us will get through on that budget, so we call for a pickup at the other end, then send Delta through when it's ready." There's also the option of calling someone in the company and asking them to just message us Essence, one at a time, but that's...embarrassing. And prone to lost pieces along the way, even aside from having to sit around and wait while someone does the song and dance upstairs for each message to avoid Song failure. "You do know where the other end is, right?"

Valentin hesitates a moment. Their smile and shrug is to cover up the hesitation; I'm getting better at picking up on that, though I think they're getting better at covering for whatever kind of mess their head is, too. "Do you think I would drag you all the way here without knowing where the bridge went?" they ask lightly, and might as well have said _No, I don't know, either I never knew or I've forgotten._ "I'll call Captain Dio to make sure the little bird feels especially safe on the other end."

And if anyone other than the Marquis knows where a secret bridge like this lets out in Stygia, it'll be Captain Dio. Most amiable Shedite I've ever met, which makes him a little unsettling, but I'm starting to get used to that. The company doesn't believe in hiring people who fall into the ordinary mold for their Band and Word; it wouldn't have me, otherwise.

After the message is sent, I wander away through the plaza while Henry and Valentin get back to sniping at each other. The mess that turned them into enemies isn't my problem. It might be Zhune's, but _he's_ not my problem anymore, either.

I thought, for a while, that we could make that work. Maybe here in the Marches is where I should've figured out otherwise. It's still my favorite part of the Symphony, such as it is, and my partner didn't like a bit of it. It's not that he had to love it, but--he only ever learned how to use it cleverly when he wanted to hurt me.

Maybe that's just how Djinn are. Always looking for the loophole that lets them get back at the people they've bound themselves to. Balseraphs lie to everyone and are sure everyone's lying to them, Habbalah have entire volumes of crazy to themselves... I shouldn't expect people to be other than their nature, even if they're peculiar edge cases. Having a slower temper than other Calabim doesn't make me not one. I just get around to breaking things at a different moment.

Valentin will be charming and Lanthano will be charming and Yuliang will be charming, because that's what Impudites do. They just do it differently from each other. Keeping expectations within reasonable boundaries: that'd be smart.

I think I've been a little charmed by Valentin on this trip, but not Charmed. So I can work with that.

I change the statue in the fountain's face until it doesn't look like Luna at all. More like the face of that little Balseraph I gave a hand to, or at least her vessel's face. Can't remember the kid's name off the top of my head--it's been a very long day, or days, or however long it's been on this trip--but a Magpie domain ought to have a Magpie's face in the center. Luna's well out of this mess. If her Archangel decides to make an object out of her, I won't ever hear about it.

But if I ask Penny what happened, he'll tell me. Or tell me that he doesn't know, or can't tell me. Which is still something.

If I were still allowed to talk to Penny.

I wander back to Valentin and Henry, and find the return message arrived while I was playing at sculptural editing. So then it's just a matter of pouring the Essence into Henry until he splits right open, straight down the chest, in a burst of golden light.

Go into the light, little bird. It'll take you to Stygia, where the cutting wind isn't quite that lethal. Usually. I wonder if that's a _joke_. The Boss's sense of humor is...something.

But that's what we do. Shove the bird through, and let Henry seal himself back up again. Captain Dio sends a message on receipt of one Habbalite, slightly injured, not _our_ problem anymore.

All we have to do now is wake up.

I tap Valentin on the shoulder. "You should go first."

"Why, Leo," they say, "it's almost as if you don't trust me." And Henry blinks, because somehow that detail hadn't come up before.

"I trust you for as long as you remember the job we're on. Wake up and go home while you know what we're here for."

"Nothing worth all this trouble," they say, and their image winks out. Right like that.

There are a half dozen ways to fake disappearance, in the Marches. But they probably went back to their sleeping vessel. I suppose I'll find out when I do the same.

"He left you too," Henry says, with such vicious satisfaction I'd be looking for an attack next, if I thought he was allowed to make any. But I don't think he is. He's bound to this place and this job, and it doesn't include attacking Wordmates here to use his...abilities. Such as they are.

"Valentin?" I say, as if I don't know what he means.

"Zhune. You thought you were different. Crawling into Shal-Mari after him, as if he would _remember_ , or be _grateful_. Didn't I try to warn you then?"

"Yes," I say, because what would I get out of telling him the truth? He's a terrible person. He's a demon. We're all supposed to be full of cruelty and betrayal and selfishness, and I am increasingly unable to hold it against people when they do the sorts of things they're made to do, if it's not causing me a problem right that minute. Maybe that's just my way of being selfish. "You were right. It didn't last."

"I knew it," Henry says.

I turn my thoughts away from the Marches, back to my own sleeping body, and wake up in reality again.


	24. An Epilogue, With Reports

1.

Chaixin sat down at the desk, and waited for the Habbalite on the other side to look her in the eyes. It took longer than she would have liked.

"Begin," she said, "with the last time you saw the Marquis."

"But--"

"We will expand from there."

"Yes," said the Habbalite. "Right. Okay."

Chaixin laid her hands on the desk, where she wouldn't drum out that old rhythm of waiting for answers, and allowed herself to wonder how many lies would appear in the first account.

#

2.

Zabina takes longer to escort Valentin off the property than I expected. Point of fact, I thought she would kick them directly back upstairs, maybe even before I got back. But she offered a ride to a distance where the disturbance would be less likely to reach people in the city, and Valentin accepted without any fuss at all.

It's not exactly that I wanted them to fuss. It was just...surprising. And so maybe I shouldn't be surprised again when Zabina doesn't get back to the house for well over an hour, after I've showered and changed clothes--you don't need to sweat to want out of clothes your body has been sleeping in for days--and settled down at the patio table with laptop for my after-mission report.

No one said I had to write one. Not explicitly. But I've figured out a few things about how this company works by now.

She arrives on the patio with her own laptop--exactly the same age as mine, and looking far newer, on account of some people not having to deal with the electronics-corrupting side-effects of being a Calabite--and two beers. One of the latter set ends up beside me while she sits down to begin her own work.

Or possibly just to see what I'm working on. I figured out ages ago that she has complete access to any machine she gives me. And why wouldn't she? Probably has copies of my car keys, too. It just makes sense.

"English?" she asks, after a moment.

"I'll translate when I'm done. I can't compose in Helltongue on this laptop, unless there's a keyboard swap I don't know about."

"French would be better practice," she says. I swap accordingly.

The beer is excellent. Bitter as an overwrought metaphor, in what Zabina calls the American style. I have to juggle my syntax in a few places to make what I already wrote work in French. It's easier to translate into Helltongue, that works on a completely different conceptual level; switching between human languages is a mess of subtle distinctions and dialect assumptions, and let's just say that my academic French is not up to speed yet.

When I come to a pause in the writing--because it's not easy to word the whole section about how Valentin helped, or "helped", in that city of the judgmental sun--I look across the table to Zabina, who has her eyes on the screen. Possibly her copy of my screen. "What did you say to Valentin?"

"In the car?"

I wave my agreement, and finish off my beer.

"We spoke on several topics," she says, "most of which are none of your business."

"What about the ones that are?"

Zabina simply looks at me. And I go back to writing my report.

She doesn't suggest any revisions at the end. I can't tell if that means it's just fine, or that I should let my report stand on its own for a job I did myself.

I get myself another beer, and one for Zabina of her preferred type. She's not the sort to drink beer, overall, which is practically heresy in Germany, but it's that sort of afternoon. It's a good thing I don't have to sleep; jetlag in coming back from the Marches would get weird.

"Did you ever meet that Habbalite?" I ask her, once both the caps are off and we're seated across from each other again.

"Why do you ask?"

"I don't think she's going to make it." I turn the bottle around on the table. The beads of condensation roll down the sides and right through the wrought iron surface of the table. Giovanna must sweep under this for whatever crumbs the birds don't take away, after our breakfasts here, though I've never seen her do it. "Being a Habbalite counts against her. And she's not great at long-term planning. Besides, her loyalty was to Daosheng, not the company, and Daosheng is gone." And I don't know if Chaixin would even try to keep someone who failed her partner that way, but I'm less comfortable saying that part out loud.

We do like to pretend that our Marquis gave us all a fair chance. But she gives those chances to the people she's already inclined to want in the company, for one reason or another. The borders aren't open.

"Does it matter to you," Zabina asks, "if she's brought in as an employee, or placed elsewhere, or never heard from again?"

"I suppose it shouldn't."

"If I wanted to know your opinion on what you ought to care about," Zabina says, "I would have asked after that information."

"Yes. It matters. I don't know if I rescued her or kidnapped her or--what." I sit back. I don't want the beer anymore. "She wasn't particularly happy where she was, in the Marches, but she was safe."

"Are you her keeper?"

"I'm not anyone's keeper, except maybe coworkers', but I still don't like fucking people over for no good reason." I take a sip from the bottle on principle. It's just as good as the last bottle was; I just don't have the mood for it anymore. "And I'm perfectly aware that 'because the Marquis told me so' is the best reason available."

"You did your job," Zabina says. "Under unusually trying circumstances."

"That Nightmares demon wasn't _that_ hard to deal with, once we stopped and got it over with."

"I meant Valentin," Zabina says, "with that inconvenient adversary being a subset of the difficulty they bring to all their work these days."

"I can deal with Valentin."

"Apparently so." She considers me over the screen of her computer. I have a hard time imagining her without something technological at hand. She's centuries old, but the smartphone she carries seems more essential to her than any of her tasteful, subdued, stupidly expensive jewelry. "You gave her an opportunity. It is not your responsibility to see that she makes full use of it."

I turn that over in my head for a few more sips. (Alcohol is a great way to stall, in so many situations. No wonder we demons took to it as fast as the humans did.) It feels like an excuse. I just called in the tip, your honor, I didn't drag her out of her home in the middle of the night myself, didn't know for sure if she was a wanted fugitive... And maybe it is an excuse. Zabina's offering me a way out of feeling responsible for whatever happens next.

I gave Luna a choice, once. She didn't run to Theft, but then, I had a thumb on the scale. Maybe that's what I'm doing again. It's close enough to a real choice. Closer than Lilim tend to give anyone.

Maybe I'm still trying to justify this to myself.

"I wouldn't mind going back to the Marches," I say. "If it comes up again."

"It doesn't, often."

"Even so."

She closes her laptop, and stands up. "Finish your beer," she says. "We're having company for dinner."

Maybe I'm going to be trying to justify this one to myself for a while yet.

#

3.

You consider yourself from the outside for a moment. Layers upon layers, that's you, Valentin, and you have determined--well, some layer of you has determined to patch up the visible cracks on the outside. Pour a bucket of concrete into the cracks within, and see where everything locks into place. If you look solid on the outside, that's good enough for anyone.

The door in front of you is one that you recognize, and you are almost certain of how you got there.

You walk into the office like a complete person and step over every hole in the floor as if they're only metaphors.

Chaixin has all her screens lit up. They don't reflect across her face; they wouldn't dare. They have her attention for not much longer before you receive it, and you hold on with both hands when a part of you might have gone wandering and let some other more convincing version of Valentin handle this conversation.

"If he didn't write anything about what I was wearing, I'll be disappointed in the report," you say. You would like to sit on her lap, or on the edge of the desk. There is a chair that you inhabit like a person who believes in furniture and normality.

"It contains a thesis statement, supporting points, and a conclusion," Chaixin says.

"I blame Zabina."

"She hasn't discouraged the tendency." She is so very tired, and you can't remember the last time you--

Liar. You can remember down to the second hand spinning on the clock when you last saw her not straining against the weight of what your Prince threw on her, and then the weight of the entire company besides. Try to keep your story straight.

You would like to imagine that she is a little amused, too. Just this moment. But you can't tell anymore.

"I didn't try very hard to bring the Habbie back," you say. "Did he mention that part?"

"Obliquely."

You set your elbows on the edge of the desk, and lean in. Your wings drape behind you so prettily, and once upon a time this conversation would have gone differently. "Did I do better than you expected, Chaixin? I've been polite to Erzebet for hours now, and she's entirely suspicious of the act. I think that once I can make people nervous by my good behavior, someone ought to admit that my behavior is controlled enough for any practical use."

She watches you. It's not fair. Daosheng would've said something by now.

"I see things that other people don't see," you say. "Maybe that's a metaphor. It's much easier in the Marches, where the metaphor and the reality are the same thing, and it's symbolism all the way down. But I came back, and I'm here, even with the holes in things, because over there I'd lose myself in the slipstream, and it wouldn't even help, not after the first rush. It's like Charm. Just when you're starting to settle into it, the whole thing collapses. I'm not always in the right place or the right time, but I'm getting better at covering up, and I'm running out of excuses, Chaixin, please say something."

She opens a hand to you.

You climb right over the desk into her lap. You are the least elegant creature in the room, and your hair is a mess, and if it weren't for her hand on the back of your neck you might well do something as ridiculous as bursting into tears. One of her computer screens lies on the ground where you kicked it off on the way past.

You are not up to standards, Valentin.

You have said that out loud.

"We noticed," she says. It's that old dual form, not the we of the company, but the we of Chaixin and Daosheng. It doesn't make any sense now, but what does? Play through Hell and the corporeal like they're the Marches. Pick up on the local theme and play along. It doesn't have to make sense. You just need to be able to fake well enough to fool your enemies.

"I'm trying," you say.

You are almost certain you have told her the truth.


End file.
